On Monday, I received an email from Thames Water, my water supplier, thanking me for “helping us save more than 5 million litres of water per day by putting away your hosepipes.” It was nice to be thanked. I do feel like I’ve done my bit. The email continued, “Despite the recent rain, our water reserves and groundwater levels will take time to recover and our hose pipe restrictions remain in place locally. For our reservoir levels to return to normal, we need at least 70% or more of our average rainfall between now and early next year.” The Thames Water region alone has had “less than half the rainfall we would expect” during a summer now described as “‘the hottest on record’ by the Met Office.”
The previous cultural touchstone for the ‘hottest year on record’ was 1976; the only year in living memory when taps in some regions dried up completely. Forget hosepipe bans – people had to queue up for water at public standpipes, harking back to the pre-industrial days of local wells.
The summer of 1976 remains iconic, with 16 consecutive days exceeding 32°C, compared to just nine days in 2025. The 1976 heatwave therefore still holds the record for the highest average summer maximum. But the persistent, months-long warmth of 2025 means it now holds the record for mean temperature.
Dr Laura Baker, senior NCAS scientist in the Department of Meteorology, writes that: “the spring of 1976 was actually colder than average in Europe [see graph below]. In contrast, in spring 2025 positive temperature anomalies can be seen over almost the whole of Europe.” The spring of 2025 was also far less rainy than in 1976, making for a far longer dry period.
The summer of ’76 was so memorable precisely because it was so exceptional. A summer like ’76 now would barely standout – in fact, it would be a relatively cool summer. The UK’s top five warmest summers have all occurred since the year 2000. Temperatures between 1 June and 31 August 2025 were 16.10°C on average across the UK - much higher than the previous record of 15.76C in 2018, and both hotter than 1976’s 15.70°C. The UK’s hottest day ever, in July 2022, hit 40.3°C. The hottest day of 1976 was 35.9°C, almost a full 5 degrees cooler.
The UK is warming by around 0.25°C per decade, and is already at least 1.24°C warmer than the period between 1961-1990. Without climate change, a summer like 2025 would have happened once in every 340 years. Now, say The Met Office, it's expected once every five years.
In fact, 1976 no longer appears on the Met Office map of historical summer mean temperature highs, which is now dominated by 21st Century records (and 2025 in particular, in dark red):
As The Daily Telegraph journalist Meike Eijsberg wrote on 15 August this year, “The further away the long, steamy summer of 1976 gets, the greater its mythical status becomes, it seems. Every time the thermometer pushes 30 degrees, hoary phrases like… ‘we survived 1976, it can’t get worse’ are wheeled out with remarkable regularity.” The obvious pushback being, over 700 heat deaths were reported in 1976, making ‘we survived’ a clear case of survivorship bias. Behind that lies some truth, however. The heat is far worse now. In the record-breaking summer of 2022 there were an estimated 2,985 excess deaths associated with heat, with nighttime temperatures pushing above 20 degrees. During the heatwave of 1976, no nights breached that figure.
The Met Office blog states that “Climate change is reshaping our understanding of what constitutes a record-breaking summer… What was once considered exceptional is increasingly becoming typical.”
The drought of 1976 was also severe due to a dry winter preceding it in 1975-76, meaning reservoir levels were already low. By comparison, the winter of 2024-25 was exceptionally wet. The current Thames Water hosepipe ban, for example, covers less than a quarter of its supply area thanks to strong winter reserves in reservoirs and groundwater.
Another contributing factor that lead to the standpipes of ’76, was that there were significantly fewer reservoirs. A number of the UK’s current largest reservoirs weren’t yet constructed in 1976, including Foremark (Severn Trent, 1977), Farmoor (Thames Water, 1977), Kielder Water (Northumbrian Water, England’s largest reservoir, completed in 1981) and Carsington (Severn Trent, 1991, England’s newest major reservoir and 11th largest) – meaning that several of the areas that resorted to standpipes in 1976 would no longer need them today.
1976 was, in fact, a wake up call for government to invest more in infrastructure to avoid the same thing happening again. 2025 should prove a similar wake-up call now.
The need to invest now arguably isn’t helped by harking back to 1976, as Stephanie Brown, Lecturer in Criminology, University of Hull, writes: “… rose-tinted memories obscure a darker truth… it perpetuates the myth of the ‘good old days’. A selective, nostalgic vision of the past that smooths over complexity and hardship in favour of a comforting, idealised narrative.” The official advice then “to share a bath with the wife” or drive a dirty car, belied how ill-prepared country was.
Avoiding standpipes in future will again require new reservoirs. England had a population of 46.6m people in 1976, compared to over 57m people now. And, as we have seen, with a climate warming by roughly 0.25°C per decade. The biggest project looming on the horizon is Thames Water’s long-running plan to build its new £2.2bn ‘SESRO’ mega reservoir of 150 million cubic meters (Mm) in Oxfordshire, which would become the second largest in the country – so big, it won’t be completed until 2040. That is too far on the horizon – with summers like 2025 now likely to occur two or three times between now and then.
But to paraphrase someone I quote in my book The Last Drop, “building new reservoirs doesn’t get you more water in the same way as opening more bank accounts doesn’t get you more money”. It all comes down to how much you’re paying in and how much you’re taking out – paying in means how resilient our natural systems are, how healthy our rivers and aquifers are. And how much we’re taking out means water use and water demand. Currently, we’re in the red.
It’s time for a radical rethink, which combines new water infrastructure with restored natural systems able to capture the rain that falls. This means rivers restored and reconnected with their floodplains and wetlands, allowing flood water to seep down into the groundwater. It means more green spaces in cities. It means nature-friendly, regenerative farming practices. It means rainwater harvesting both at home and on business premises.
One new reservoir project in the Fens is combining nature-based solutions such as wetlands to enhance its water supply and mitigate climate change impacts, according to Anglian Water. This approach is “complementing the primary function of water storage”, they say, by integrating natural processes to improve water quality, capture carbon, soil health and increase biodiversity.
While wetlands next to Somerset's Durleigh Reservoir are delivering significant biodiversity and water quality improvements as Wessex Water invests in nature-based solutions, too. By contrast, Thames Water’s ‘SESRO’ is a sledge-hammer to crack a nut; a mega-reservoir built upwards on flat farmland, which will be filled by water pumped upwards from the river Thames – there’s nothing nature-based about it. And given the projections for reduced river flows by 2040, some speculate it may never be filled.
Thames Water are also targeting our water use. In their latest email to customers they inform they are rolling out smart meters to “help us locate leaks in customers’ pipes. Currently, we’ve installed over one million smart meters… [and] planning on installing or upgrading a further c.1,200,000.” Plus 40,000 acoustic loggers that help detect leaks with an expected 100,000 in place by mid-2027. In fact, Thames Water hit the one million smart meters figure back in 2023, having started way back in 2015. While acoustic loggers in pipes have been in use internationally for decades. Rather than evidence of urgent investment, this is evidence of long-term delay and underinvestment.
The nature of climate change, and our increasingly long, hot and dry summers, will require us to hold onto water and rainfall like never before; a combination of concrete reservoirs, restored natural systems and demand management will be needed.
Professor David Hannah, UNESCO Chair in Water Sciences at the University of Birmingham, says that the summer of 2025, “represents only an early indication of a broader trend, as anthropogenic climate change is projected to significantly increase the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events in the UK.”
Arguably no-one is more keenly aware of this than the farming community. Another area where 2025 tops 1976 is the dryness of the soil. Meteorologist Nedim Sladic writes that, “the 2025 soil status is now drier than in 1976, especially in deeper profiles…. The showery nature of the precipitation is not sufficient to significantly alleviate the drought.” And as a recent poster on Farming Forum said, “1976 always gets mentioned… I think droughts should now be compared to 2025.”
