Met Office warns drought 'won't be fixed' overnight as Britons brace for blast of rain

However, they said the rainfall would not be a "huge amount" and "highly hit and miss from place to place", before conditions became drier again over the weekend.

Met Office data showed up to 23mm of rain fell in parts of central southern Lancashire in the 12 hours to 6am on Wednesday, with up to 13mm recorded in parts of Northern Ireland and between 6-10mm across south-west England.

Met Office meteorologist Aidan McGivern said: "I suspect many people across England and Wales will at least enjoy the feel of some rain falling out of the sky during the next few days.

"But it's not going to solve the drought situation overnight because we're not expecting huge amounts and it will be highly variable because a lot of it will come in the form of showers."

Drier conditions are expected to return by the weekend.

Mr McGivern described Wednesday as a "very showery day" nationwide, with Northern Ireland and western and central Scotland bearing the brunt through "frequent showers with heavy downpours, hail and thunder".

Rain has been hitting parts of the UK this week

PA

Southern parts of the country would experience less frequent rainfall, though central England and eastern Wales could still face downpours.

Temperatures on Wednesday were forecast to reach 25C in London, 20C in Cardiff, 19C in Manchester and 16C in Glasgow.

Thursday is set to bring "very heavy rain" to northern England and north and west Wales, with greater chances of showers spreading southward during the afternoon.

However, the rainfall will remain "hit and miss, very speckled in nature," Mr McGivern cautioned.

The Queen Mother Reservoir in east Berkshire saw levels drop

PA

Temperatures on Thursday are expected to dip below the seasonal average across much of the UK, a rarity this summer.

Wessex Water imposed a hosepipe ban on Tuesday affecting all 1.4 million of its customers in Bath, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, the first such restriction the company has enforced in half a century, dating back to the drought of 1976.

The measure means more than 27 million people across England are now subject to hosepipe restrictions following months of relentlessly hot and dry weather.

Thames Water, which introduced its own ban on July 23, has called on customers to keep cutting their consumption despite the incoming rain.

The Lockwood Reservoir, one of the ten Walthamstow Reservoirs of the Walthamstow Wetlands, has dropped to low levels

REUTERS

The company reported that household demand had dropped by three per cent in London and by more than six per cent across the Thames Valley and home counties since restrictions took effect.

Those reductions have come amid extraordinary pressure on the water network, with customers consuming roughly 100 million litres more per day than usual throughout the dry spell.

Thames Water revealed on Tuesday that its London reservoirs stood at 74 per cent capacity, below the level the company would normally anticipate at this point in the year.

The Queen Mother Reservoir in Oxfordshire, by contrast, was 92 per cent full.

Fresher conditions are expected later this week

PA

Rainfall across the Thames catchment area during July amounted to less than 1mm, representing just two per cent of the long-term average for the month.

The cooler and wetter conditions come after the UK’s fifth heatwave of the summer, during which the hottest day of the year was recorded in Kew Gardens, London, on Thursday when temperatures reached 38.1C.

Officially, the hottest day recorded in England was on July 19, 2022, when mercury hit 40.3C in Coningsby, Lincolnshire.