England’s driest village has finally seen some rain after it experienced its longest drought since 1893.
The record-breaking 62-day drought in Wisley, Surrey, the most parched location in the country, officially came to an end on Wednesday morning with a meagre 1.6mm of rainfall, Met Office meteorologist Jonathan Vautrey confirmed.
The dry spell, which began on June 17, nearly doubled the area’s previous record of 36 consecutive rainless days set during the famous heatwave summer of 1976.
Britain’s all-time record of 73 days without rain, established in Mile End in East London in 1893, remained unbroken.
“Considering some of the thunderstorms in the north have brought people 20mm in an hour, getting 1.6mm in the first bit of the morning was not a great deal,” Mr Vautrey said.
Most residents only noticed the change on Thursday, when scattered showers finally swept across the area beneath towering cumulonimbus clouds.
At the Holistic Horse and Pony Centre, owner Wendy Firmin-Price, 70, and manager Nancy Winton, 56, “danced for joy” in their parched paddock when the rain arrived.
“Never have English people been so happy to see rain,” Ms Firmin-Price said.
Ms Winton described driving to work on Thursday beneath a rainbow after more than two months of relentless dryness. “It started raining and I just said ‘thank you’,” she said. “Although it’s only brief, it’s great to deal with the dust because some of the horses have developed bad coughs with everything being so dry and dusty, we have had to have the vet out.”
Across the centre’s 45 acres of grazing land, several of its 28 horses and ponies have required veterinary treatment for drought-related conditions including respiratory problems, asthma attacks, heat stroke and laminitis, a painful hoof inflammation triggered by elevated sugar levels in drought-stressed grass.
The financial strain on the riding centre has been severe. Hay costs have soared to nearly £6,000 per month — roughly three times what the centre would normally spend — after prices doubled following a poor harvest caused by the 2025 drought, a crisis now deepened by another weak yield this summer.
“We are having to feed twice as much hay now than we would normally in the winter, at twice the price,” Ms Firmin-Price told The Times.
The prolonged dry conditions have also left the riding arena compacted and unusable for horses, but the centre cannot afford to resurface it.
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“We’ve had to economise on staffing and not invest in the place and it’s hard to keep on top of it, hence things start falling apart,” Ms Firmin-Price said.
Even the return of rain poses fresh dangers, as the initial regrowth of green grass following drought also contains dangerously high sugar levels for horses.
On Wisley Common nature reserve, the rainfall did nothing to replenish a pond that has shrunk to little more than a puddle, driving waterfowl away from their breeding grounds this year.
Adam Bolton, nature recovery manager at Surrey Wildlife Trust, which oversees the reserve, warned that the lowland heathland — an internationally rare habitat supporting ground-nesting birds and reptiles — remained at “incredibly high fire risk”.
“The ponds have never been this low and the heathland has never been this dry, we just need a prolonged period of rain,” he said.
Conservation grazing officer Lee Smith reported that hay yields for the reserve’s Belted Galloway cattle herd had fallen further from last year’s harvest, which was itself 35 per cent below the previous year’s.
Meanwhile, National Highways contractors were deploying water bowsers and heavy-duty hoses to douse tinder-dry heather planted on the UK’s first heathland green bridge, a wildlife corridor built over the M25.
Residents in the Wisley area have been prohibited from using hosepipes since July 17, when local supplier Affinity Water imposed a ban.
Leslie Macnair, 80, a retired printing director, described how he and his neighbours have resorted to carrying full watering cans to their communal garden each evening. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “We have been using the basin in the sink and throwing that on the garden. Someone we know has been having a shower one night and a bath the next, and then using the bath water to water the garden.”
The brief Wednesday morning rainfall offered scant comfort. “We had about two minutes of rain in the morning, but it needs a good drink all night really,” Ms Macnair said.
The Government has cautioned that the recent rainfall will not resolve what it described as a “worsening” drought, while Thames Water indicated its hosepipe ban could remain in force until the end of 2026.
The National Drought Group — comprising officials, water companies, farmers, anglers and other stakeholders — has shifted from monthly to weekly meetings as the Environment Agency intensifies its response.
At RHS Wisley, the Royal Horticultural Society’s 240-acre flagship garden, a decade-long push towards drought-tolerant planting has paid dividends. Tim Upson, director of gardens and horticulture, said irrigated borders were watered just two hours weekly, at night to reduce evaporation, using only two-thirds of the site’s daily abstraction allowance from the River Wey.
“The most important water store is the soil itself,” Mr Upson said, urging gardeners to mulch in winter and consider drought-resilient species.
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