The Tube at this hour is a matter of joining the right crowd rather than choosing a seat, and getting through it depends on leaving at a specific minute. This page counts down to 8:34 am precisely — the moment to leave, the moment to touch in, or the moment a meeting on the other side begins.
The figure on this page comes from your own device's clock, checked continuously and recalculated every second against 8:34 am. There is nothing to press and nothing to set up first — the count is already running by the time the page has finished loading, and it keeps going while you are looking at it.
Twelve o'clock is where the 12-hour clock is at its weakest, since 12 am and 12 pm are read the wrong way round often enough to cause real trouble. Writing a time as 08:34 removes the problem outright, because a 24-hour figure only ever points at one moment in the day.
Common questions
What happens if 8:34 am has already gone for today?
The count simply carries on towards the next occurrence, which is tomorrow. That rollover happens on its own — the page does not need reloading and there is nothing to reset by hand.
Which clock does it use?
Your own. It reads the local time and time zone from the device you are looking at, so the figure reflects where you actually are rather than a fixed zone written into the page.
Will this alert me when the time arrives?
No. It is a live number rather than an alarm — nothing rings, buzzes or notifies you at zero. If you need to be interrupted at 8:34 am, set an alarm as well and treat this page as the running total.
Is it affected by the clocks changing?
Only in the sense that your device is. When the change between GMT and BST happens at the end of March and October, the device adjusts and the countdown follows it without anything to do here.
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