How many days until winter?

Winter begins at the December solstice, which falls on the 21st in most years and occasionally on the 22nd. It is the shortest day: London sees under eight hours of daylight, Manchester a little less, and Lerwick in Shetland barely more than five and a half, with the sun scraping along low over the rooftops before giving up around three in the afternoon.

Britain's winter is defined less by cold than by darkness and damp. Temperatures rarely drop as far as continental Europe's thanks to the Atlantic, but the light goes early — dark before four o'clock in December — and it stays overcast for weeks. Gritters go out overnight, heating bills climb, and vitamin D and SAD lamps get talked about at length.

The solstice sits four days before Christmas, so the darkest point of the year is immediately followed by the most heavily lit fortnight of it. Solstice sunrise at Stonehenge draws a crowd on the morning of the 21st, and from that point the days lengthen again, at first by barely a minute a day.

Meteorological winter, which the Met Office starts on 1 December, is the other definition in common use; this page follows the astronomical one, counting to midnight at the start of the solstice date for the relevant year.