Greenwich London: GMT Bezel Launch

The majority of our adventures tend to see us heading away from home- Scotland, Wales, Dorset or back to the factory in Switzerland to name a few.

But to launch the GMT Bezel collection where better than the home of GMT- Greenwich, London. So we hoped on a beautifully built boat called Helena design by Naval Architect Vripack which was inspired by the old Swedish smuggler boats of the last century. 

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the yearly mean or average of the time each day when the sun crosses the Prime Meridian at the Royal Observatory Greenwich on the southern banks of the River Thames.

Put simply, mean time is clock time rather than solar or astronomical time. It was first used in the 1650s when John Flamsteed- the first Astronomer Royal created the formula to convert solar time to mean time.

Until the mid-19th century nearly every town in the UK kept it’s own local time time by the sun. It wasn’t until the 1850s that GMT was adopted as the single standard time for the expanding British railway network in order for the trains to run to a timetable.

It wasn’t until 1884 until that the Greenwich Meantime Time became the international standard and the Prime Meridian the centre of the world. Naming Greenwich as Longitude 0 on all sea charts.

The first clock to show GMT was the Shepherd gate clock which was installed in 1852 and is still running on the gates at the Royal Observatory.

Today, the GMT function on watches establishes local time without ever losing sight of a second time-zone in a single glance. It means it’s still an incredibly useful tool for people that travel.

So to celebrate the launch of our new GMT Bezel collection we’ve name the three watches Maze, Crooms and Charlton. All names the roads that surround Greenwich Park.