WORCESTER'S public clock faces have been proudly displaying the time for hundreds of years - but are they still to be trusted?

Your Worcester News sent reporter James Wallin out and about to discover how many public clocks in the city centre continue to tell the correct time.

He found: * Of the 14 clocks checked, four had stopped.

* In total they gave 10 different variations on the time

* They ranged from seven minutes slow to two minutes fast.

* Just four were correct.

The clocks outside the Slug and Lettuce on The Cross;Ernest Jones, High Street; and Worcester Library, Foregate Street, were all showing the correct time.

The fourth accurate clock is on All Saint's Church, Bridge Street, where David Beacham has been advising on its maintenance for the past 30 years.

Mr Beacham said the current trend is to move from the old style of weight-driven, hand-wound clocks to ones which automatically wind themselves or are fully electrical, although these newer methods can bring their own problems.

"Many ordinary clocks don't keep perfect time," he said. "Once they're wound errors will build up. Unless someone resets them every week, a minute a week becomes four minutes a month and so on."

The responsibility for the upkeep of the clocks falls to the owners of the premises.

Simon West, store manager of Bang and Olufsen in Foregate Street, said the clock outside his shop stopped working two years ago but all efforts to find someone to repair it have failed.

"As soon as we moved in we wanted to get the Bang and Olufsen sign put on it and illuminated," he said. "We tried to find someone to keep it serviced for us but we couldn't find anyone in the Yellow Pages."

Other clocks in the centre which have stopped completely include the one outside Subway in Foregate Street, which hasn't worked for more than three years, and one above an empty shop in Angel Place that has also been idle for several years.

When asked, people in the city centre agreed that they rarely used public clocks, but thought they should be maintained.

Robert Lovelass, of Northwick, Worcester, said: "I think they're more ornamental than timepieces. Occasionally you do look up and it's very annoying if the clock is not working."

Brian Moore, of Warndon Villages, Worcester, said: "If they were gone people would miss them."

June Parker, of Droitwich, said: "I just put my watch on, because they're all different. They just don't bother to look after them these days, do they?"

Liz Parker, of Worcester, said: "When I first moved here, not that long ago, I did look up and I took it as gospel that the clock was right so I was rushing around thinking I was late, then later I found that I was actually an hour early."

by James Wallin

9:45am Wednesday 5th September 2007

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