The Town That Measures The Weather

When the hosepipe ban came into force across the Thames Valley at one minute past midnight on Thursday 23 July it was an increasingly familiar event - Reading was under restriction last summer too, though only the postcodes north of the river were caught then. This time Thames Water applied the ban across its entire water-supply area, some ten million customers from Gloucestershire to west Kent, after weeks in which demand ran roughly a tenth above normal in the Thames Valley and the Home Counties.

There is a particular irony in Reading going thirsty and sweltering in yet another heatwave. Few towns anywhere in the world are better equipped to explain why it is happening. Within a few miles of Reading station sit a century-old climate record, the only dedicated university meteorology department in the United Kingdom, the headquarters of Europe's medium-range forecasting centre, and the offices of a meteorological society founded in 1850. When the national conversation reaches for a scientist to explain the drought, the voice on the radio is very often speaking from Whiteknights or Shinfield Park.

180 Years Of Records

The foundation of all of it is a patch of mown grass near the Earley Gate entrance to the University's Whiteknights campus, 66 metres above sea level.

Weather observations began at what was then University College, Reading in 1901, initially as a rainfall station on the London Road campus. Records from the earliest years have been lost, but an almost complete daily series of temperature, pressure and rainfall can be assembled from January 1908 onwards — sunshine duration was added in 1956, when a Campbell–Stokes recorder was mounted on the parapet of the Agricultural Botany building. The station stayed at London Road until 1967, moved to Whiteknights in January 1968, and settled on its present site on 1 January 1970. The Department of Meteorology took the site over in 1987 and, from 2008, it has been known formally as the Reading University Atmospheric Observatory.

What makes the series unusually trustworthy is its continuity of hands. Since 1918 the observations have been the responsibility of just five principal observers. The first, James Burgess, a Physics Department technician, kept the record for forty-two years and received a Meteorological Office long-service award in 1955. Arthur Moon took over in 1960 and served until 1977; George Goodhind followed until 1985, then Ken Spiers; today the daily readings are largely the work of Mike Stroud. Manual observations are still made at 0900, 365 days a year, alongside automatic sensors logging every second.

The numbers that series produces are the raw material of any honest account of Reading's climate. Over the standard 1991–2020 averaging period the mean annual temperature at the observatory was 10.9°C, with January the coldest month at 5.1°C and July the warmest at 17.8°C. Average annual precipitation is 655 millimetres, falling on 157 days. March is typically the driest month, October the wettest. The extremes of the whole record are 37.6°C, set on 19 July 2022, and −14.5°C on 14 January 1982.

The Science Of Weather

The Department of Meteorology was established in 1965 and remains the only one of its kind in the country. It is ranked first among UK universities and tenth in the world for atmospheric science in the ShanghaiRanking subject tables, it won a Queen's Anniversary Prize in 2021, and six lead authors of the most recent IPCC assessment came from Reading. The department hosts a Regius Professorship in Meteorology and Climate Science, created in 2013 and held today by Professor Hannah Cloke, and houses major parts of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the National Centre for Earth Observation, along with Met Office staff embedded on campus.

It is also, quietly, responsible for one of the most widely reproduced images in modern science. The climate stripes - the bar-code of blue-to-red bands showing warming since the nineteenth century - were designed by Reading's Professor Ed Hawkins and have since been printed on everything from face masks to the side of Glastonbury Tor.

Two miles south, at Shinfield Park, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has been in Reading since the 1970s and recently redeveloped its campus. ECMWF was established by convention in 1975 to pool European meteorological resources; the UK won the bid to host it partly because the proposed site sat close to both the Met Office, then at Bracknell, and the University of Reading. The first supercomputer arrived at Shinfield Park in October 1978, and operational medium-range forecasts have been issued since 1 August 1979. The Centre now runs as a three-site organisation — the data centre moved to Bologna in 2021–22 and a Copernicus operation opened in Bonn — but Reading remains the headquarters, with most scientific and forecasting work, and a new building is being developed on the university campus itself. ECMWF holds the world's largest archive of numerical weather prediction data and its forecasts are, by common consent, the best global product available.

The third institution is the least visible and the oldest. The Royal Meteorological Society, founded by ten gentlemen in the library of Hartwell House in April 1850, has occupied 104 Oxford Road since April 1990. Mannson House is a Grade II listed building of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, sitting in an ordinary Reading streetscape; from it the Society publishes the journals of record for the discipline, including the monthly magazine *Weather*, launched in 1946. It moved to Reading from Bracknell, following the gravitational pull of the Met Office, which had its headquarters there from 1961 until the 2003 relocation to Exeter. Reading was one of the towns on the ballot paper when staff were asked where they wanted to go. Had that vote gone differently, the Berkshire cluster would be even denser than it is.

Extremes Down The Years

The Reading record is long enough to contain some genuinely violent weather.

The town's worst single meteorological event predates the university series. On 24 March 1840 a tornado struck the Great Western Railway station. Henry West, twenty-four, was working on the station roof attending to the lantern; he was blown off, carried some sixty metres and found in a trench. He died of his injuries. A brass plaque beside platform 7 commemorates him.

The winter of 1946–47 remains the benchmark for cold and its consequences. Reading's coldest March night on record, −11.3°C, fell on 7 March 1947; days later the snowmelt sent the Thames and the Kennet over their banks in the most widespread flooding of the twentieth century. A severe gale on 16 March that year killed two people in the town. Then, extraordinarily, the same year delivered a heatwave: from 11 August 1947, Reading recorded twenty-six consecutive days at 25°C or above. In February 1929 the Thames had frozen from bank to bank. The winters of 1963 and 2010 brought their own prolonged snow; the floods of 2000, the exceptionally wet winter of 2014 and the Great Storm of October 1987 are all in the logbooks.

Drought is equally well represented. April 1912 was the driest April in the record with 0.8 millimetres of rain, and a thirty-day rainless spell began on 10 April 1942, although this may be rivalled this year. The searing summers of 1911, 1976, 2003 and 2006 are recorded in the same pages. For thirty years the town's hottest day was 10 August 2003, when the observatory reached 36.4°C during the European heatwave. That stood until 19 July 2022, the day Britain first passed 40°C and Reading reached 37.6°C.

Warm nights tell the story of a changing climate more starkly than hot days. It took over forty years from the start of the record for Reading to register its first tropical night — an overnight minimum staying above 20°C — in September 1949. The second did not arrive until 2 August 1995. Since then they have come in 2020, twice in 2022, once in 2025, and twice more in a single week last month.

Record Breaking 2026

This year has rewritten large parts of that ledger, and it began by rewriting the opposite extreme. January 2026 was Reading's fourth-wettest in almost 120 years, with 121 millimetres of precipitation, and rain fell on 31 consecutive days — one of the longest unbroken wet spells in the entire series. That followed 2025, which was one of the warmest and sunniest years on record here and the driest in two decades. 

Then the taps turned off. March delivered 70 per cent of average rainfall, April just 12 per cent — six millimetres for the whole month — and May 45 per cent, with sunshine running well above normal throughout. On 25 May the observatory recorded its hottest May day since records began, beating a mark set on 29 May 1944; the month peaked at 33.0°C.

June was worse, and more remarkable. The 1976 June record of 34.0°C was passed on the 23rd and passed again on the 24th, when Reading reached 34.9°C. Four consecutive days at or above 33°C is something the record has never previously contained: the old benchmark was two days, achieved in 1923, 2003, 2020 and 2022. Seven successive nights failed to drop below 17°C, against a previous record of four. On 26 June the minimum did not fall below 21.3°C, Reading's hottest night ever measured. The month's mean temperature, 18.75°C, made it the warmest June in the series.

July has continued the pattern rather than breaking it. The 9th reached 34.2°C, the ninth-hottest July day on record. By 12 July, Reading had logged fifteen days at 30°C or above in 2026, overtaking the fourteen recorded in 1976 and the thirteen in 1911 — with six weeks of summer still to run. Set against the longer record the shift is unambiguous: the 2020s have so far produced 47 days above 30°C at the observatory, compared with 27 in the 2010s and 18 in the whole of the 1970s.

Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot

Nationally, 2026 has already delivered three heatwaves, a record eight days above 34°C — beating both 1976 and 2020 — and the first year on record in which 35°C has been reached in May, June and July alike.

But as Dr Stephen Burt of the Department of Meteorology has pointed out, the heat is only half the story. Reading has had less than half its average rainfall since early March, and at one point in mid-July just two millimetres had fallen in four weeks. Across England, rainfall for July to the 21st stood at 3 per cent of the long-term average, with parts of the south and east recording nothing at all — the longest rainless spell since the mid-1990s. Soil moisture deficits reached record levels for the time of year across much of the country, river flows fell with only a sixth of monitoring sites classed as normal, and the Environment Agency moved the Thames and London catchment to "prolonged dry weather" status. No English region has yet been formally declared in drought, but eight temporary use bans are now in force between them covering more than twenty million people.

The wet winter bought the region some time. It has now been spent.

There is something fitting, and slightly uncomfortable, about the fact that the town supplying the world with its most-shared image of global warming is also watching its own gardens brown under a ban. The Reading record exists because a technician in the Physics Department decided, in 1918, that somebody ought to write the numbers down every morning. A hundred and eight summers later, those numbers are the reason we can say with confidence that this one is not simply a hot spell but a shift — and that the phrase "the summer of 1976", the benchmark for half a century, may finally have been retired.