Parts of the UK endure first ever month without any rain

Parts of the UK have seen zero rainfall for the entire month of July for the first time in their history, underscoring the scale and severity of the ongoing drought gripping the country.

At London’s Kew Gardens, which hosts a Met Office weather station, there has been no measurable rainfall at all in July, the first time that has happened at the site since records began in 1871.

Meanwhile Heathrow Airport in London has seen 42 consecutive days and counting without any rain, a new record for the site which has been monitored since 1948.

Advertisement

And in Stratfield Mortimer, a village outside the city of Reading, zero rainfall was recorded in July for the first time in its history. The nearby market town of Wokingham recorded just 0.1 millimetres of rainfall over the same period, according to data released by the University of Reading.

“Some parts of the Reading area remained without measurable rainfall throughout the calendar month, the only time this has happened since continuous local rainfall records began in 1858, almost 170 years ago,” Stephen Burt at the University of Reading said in a statement.

Free newsletter

The story is similar across southern England, with at least 20 Met Office weather stations seeing zero rainfall for July for the first time in their recorded history, according to provisional data seen by New Scientist. They include stations in Lincolnshire, Dorset, Kent, Greater London, Essex, Monmouthshire, Surrey, the Isle of Wight, East Sussex, Hereford & Worcester, and Hampshire, underscoring the widespread nature of the current drought.

The Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, said July’s weather had been “truly exceptional”, with both England and Wales enduring their driest July in 190 years, coupled with extreme heat and almost unbroken sunshine. Rainfall across southern England averaged just 1.5 mm for July 2026, just 2 per cent of the 1991-2020 average, while mean temperatures were 3.2°C above average for the time of year.

In north London, software engineer Ben Masschelein-Rodgers has been operating a private weather station since 2009 near Hampstead Heath. He says July 2026 was the first calendar month without any measurable rain in the local area, based on both his own 17-year time series and Met Office records for the area dating back to 1871.

More than half of England and all of Wales is now officially in drought, causing landscapes to turn yellow, wildfires to burn and farmers to warn of looming crop shortages. In Europe, the prolonged hot, dry weather has sparked huge wildfires and driven river levels to historic lows. Low river levels on the Danube have forced operators to shut down nuclear power reactors in Hungary and Romania, while in Germany low water levels on the Rhine have curtailed shipping.

But even though rain will bring relief, it also carries risks. Jeff Da Costa at the University of Reading says there is now a “really substantial” risk of severe flash flooding in the UK, when rain finally falls on sun-baked soils. “Most of the soils are crusted; reservoirs are stressed,” he says. “It’s not a day or two of rainfall that will solve it all. It might actually pose the greatest hazard of them all.”