It used to be 191 and charged at local call rates
191 used to be the number here to reach the miscellaneous inquiries operator (not the normal assistance operator). That's back when directory was on 192 before all this 118xxx free-for-all started.
In London (and the five other director cities) the clock used to be accessed by dialing the 3-digit service code T-I-M (846) for
TIMe. This led people to talk about "Calling Tim," and you can still hear that occasionally today, even though the TIM code was withdrawn when we went to All-Figure Numbering in the late 1960s.
Out in the provinces the clock was normally on 8081, although from minor exchanges it was sometimes necessary to dial a local routing code first to reach the parent office, e.g. 9-8081.
Nowadays, it's just 123 from anywhere in the country.
It used to be in an almost received pronouciation female voice with a slightly irish accent
I'm sure I have an audio clip of the old Irish clock somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment.
We used to have WeatherDial service from the met office on a similar short code for the price of a local call.
Same here at one time, or at least the cost of a normal long-distance call if you had to call a far-off town. London, for example, used the 246 prefix for many years for all sorts of recorded information: Weather, tourist information, theatre announcements, etc. Many of the numbers were 246-8021, 246-8041, 246-8051, etc.
These days you can only find weather services on the pay-pay-pay-then-pay-some-more 09xx premium codes.
There's a lot more interesting information about the original GPO speaking clock service here:
http://www.britishtelephones.com/clocks/clocksp.htm
