Welcome to the great floods of London, showing on repeat until we all go under

LONDONERS aren't used to wild weather - it reaches us in pieces, through gaps in buildings. So when thunder rolled around central London on Tuesday, we sat in silence, listening.

- Martha Gill

Several of us went to the soaked window of the London Library to watch the wind bothering the trees in the square. All around we could see smudges of people at other windows, doing the same.

Of course we can't cope with it. Within six hours four fire engines were parked around a roundabout-turned-boating lake in Abbey Wood where cars sat stranded. And the next day the flood alerts started, this time covering a stretch of the Thames from Putney Bridge to Teddington Weir. More floods, no doubt, will come.

Rain in London in winter shouldn't be news but it frequently now is. In 2021 flash flooding turned Pudding Mill Lane station into a swimming pool and two hospitals in east London had to warn patients to stay away. The Thames Barrier, which stops tidal floods washing into the city, was closed just 10 times in the decade after its construction in 1981. But between 2013 and 2014 it was closed 50 times. Londoners are getting used to wading through inches of water on their way to work. And London's predicament mirrors that of everywhere else: we are a country which now floods badly, somewhere, every year.