Town Time

 
Image shows 3 people, a mother and daughter and a man sitting down drawing in front of a colourful stall. There is bunting and a blue banner with Town Time written on it in large yellow letters.

Town Time, installation view, Offbeat Live Art Festival, Oxford 2022. (lost 5 minutes 2 seconds)

 

Town Time is a playful and contemplative participatory art project that invites visitors like you, to momentarily uncouple from the constant motion of measured time. 

The project is inspired by an archive in the Museum in the Park that records how in 1880 Stroud was one of the last towns in the country to switch over from ‘town time’ to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) following the arrival of the railways. Prior to this standardisation of time, each town or city was slightly out of step with other places, basing it’s time on the rising and setting of the sun. 

Visitors are invited to select an activity from a ‘menu’ of options to do with the artists for the amount of time that was ‘lost’ when the town where the project is being presented lost when they switched from town time to GMT.