Current time in BST (Europe/London)

What is Europe/London?

Europe/London is rooted in Greenwich Mean Time, the civil-time reference that grew from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and Britain's railway standardization. International meridian decisions in the nineteenth century made Greenwich the zero-degree reference for longitude, while modern UTC is maintained through atomic timekeeping and national laboratories. The IANA zone records the United Kingdom's legal summer-time rules, so London alternates between GMT in winter and British Summer Time in summer. This is why London pages often carry both a historic GMT identity and a practical BST scheduling warning during summer.

London office hours concentrate around 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., but finance, law, consulting, and media frequently stretch earlier or later to cover Asia and New York. The trading day is built around London Stock Exchange sessions and European market overlap. Lunch is usually shorter than in southern Europe, while after-work meetings and client events often fill the early evening before US colleagues finish their day. The city also acts as a handoff point: Asia work can close in the morning and New York work can open in the afternoon.

Use Europe/London for UK civil time, global FX and insurance markets, European headquarters, broadcast publishing, and product releases that need morning Europe with same-day US overlap. It is also a common neutral reference for distributed teams because GMT and UTC are identical during UK winter. It is useful when a timestamp must mean UK civil time, not merely UTC, because summer dates are one hour apart.