I hasten to point out that just because your server is not in your timezone, it does not mean that it "cannot be relied upon to be accurate". But I know what you mean :-)

All you need to do is find out how many hours you are behind GMT, and substract that from localtime. Try this (untested):

my $time = localtime; 
my $hours_behind_gmt = 4; 
# localtime is in seconds, hence we need to get hours --> seconds
my $time_in_my_timezone = localtime - ($hours_behind_gmt * 60 * 60); 
print scalar localtime($time_in_my_timezone);
[download]

Beware of the main caveat of dealing with different timezones: Daylight Savings Time. If your server is based in England, during the summer it will not use GMT--it will use BST (British Summer Time) instead. So beware.

For doing fancy operations with dates, you might like to use the Date::Calc module on CPAN. Finally, in future, please do a bit of research yourself. This is quite a basic question and the answer could probably be found with a bit of hacking and Google-ing. If you have done research, give us the code you've already got (even if you think it's bad). People are more inclined to help if you seem to be making a real effort yourself.