Part of the clock and watch collection is displayed in a redesigned gallery 'Faces of time'.

Time 'flies', we say or it 'drags', depending on our individual understanding of the moment. We can 'keep' or 'lose - track' of it. We even speak of 'making time', but do we really know what time is? Can we measure it objectively, as we can a kilo of tomatoes or a pint of beer?

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity shows us a world in which space and time fuse to become four dimensional 'space-time'. We cannot see time, but we can see things moving which tell us that time is passing, we can then use that movement in the world around us to tell the time.

This is the story of horology. Throughout recorded history human beings have striven to develop more precise and regulated mechanisms, or 'movement', which aim to give us an objective measure of time. It is an extraordinary story and it involves the creation of some of the most wonderful and beautiful, as well as some of the weirdest devices ever produced by human ingenuity. These horology web pages set out to tell at least some of that story, showing both how human beings have learned to measure time, and how historically that process has helped to define our whole way of life.

The pages below also provide an opportunity to explore one of the finest horological collections in existence. Based on the superb collection assembled by Frederic Gershom Parkington, and bequeathed to him in 1953 to the Borough of St Edmundsbury in memory of his son, it has been continuously added to over the years so that it now ranges over the whole field of time measuring instruments, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the very beginnings to the present time.