Britain is one of the wettest countries in Europe, and this summer it told people not to water the garden.
Crossbencher · 16 August 2026
Britain is one of the wettest countries in Europe, and this summer it told people not to water the garden. Weeks of heat and wildfire, reservoirs sinking, hosepipe bans spreading - and beneath the weather, a harder fact the forecast will never mention. The rain that failed to fall is nature's doing. The water that wasn't there to draw on is ours.
Start with the fact that ought to end the argument before it begins. England hasn't finished a major new reservoir since the early 1990s. The one now rising at Havant, in Hampshire, will be the first this country has built in a generation. Across those same years England filled up: by the 2021 census it held 56,489,800 people. More of us, drawing on tanks our grandparents built, and the rain, when it comes, increasingly arrives all at once. You don't need to be an engineer to see where those two lines cross.
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