LONDON — Britain is notorious for its weather. This year April was unusually fine and warm. May, June and July were unseasonably cool. To describe these months as "wet" would be an English understatement. There was record rainfall with some places being deluged by rains normally only seen in the tropics. These led to serious floods that caused a small number of deaths and widespread damage to property both private and commercial. Many thousand of insurance claims have been made and the costs of the damage have been huge.
The worst affected areas in the first rainstorms were in Yorkshire where Sheffield and Doncaster were badly hit, and in Humberside where large numbers of homes in Hull were flooded. The second batch of storms affected particularly the Severn and Avon rivers, which overflowed their banks and inundated the ancient cities of Gloucester and Tewkesbury. The latter was for a time turned into an island.
In the Gloucester area many houses were temporarily deprived of power, but more concern was caused by the interruption to water supplies caused by flood damage to a water treatment plant. This situation mirrored that described in the famous lines from Samuel Coleridge's poem "The Ancient Mariner."