Anyone who has ever turned on the TV expecting to watch live tennis coverage from Wimbledon and finds themselves watching Cliff Richard singing to the crowd or Jimmy Connors playing Bjorn Borg again will appreciate that English summer weather is unpredictable.

In a single day last week two months worth of rain fell on southern England causing flash flooding as drains overflowed and roads became rivers. Over the following 24 hours the rainwater running off the Welsh hills, swelled the rivers Severn and Avon resulting in water levels four metres higher than normal, breaking their banks and causing the most widespread flooding experienced in this country for decades.  

The Gloucestershire town of Tewkesbury at the confluence of these two rivers was cut off by the rising water, with roads impassible and hundreds of houses and businesses flooded.

My Midlands-based colleague Darren Staples and I met on the road to Tewkesbury; he hot foot (or rather damp sock) from covering flooding around Stratford further up the River Avon and I from London where the worst of the flash flooding had drowned a few white vans and left unspeakable objects previously consigned to the sewers, floating in suburban cellars.  We were well equipped with waders, bicycle, waterproof camera housings, crisp £20 notes with which to flag down lifts from passing mariners. Darren arrived convinced that we needed to take to the air to show the scale of things and at least 50 u-turns later, with mild wader-chaffing and a growing sense that we were getting nowhere, I agreed with him.

Fortunately Darren drew the short straw and I waved him back into the brown water before heading off to the convenient, dryly located Gloucester airfield and the amazingly accommodating Heliflight helicopter services. A no-fly-zone had just been ordered above the worst hit area, with only operational flights permitted but as he removed the door on my side the pilot opined that I was clearly “operating”and so off we went,  joined in no time by helicopters from Sky and ITN who were oviously ”operating” too. 

Looking down on the scene from the alarmingly small single-engine helicopter I immediately got a better perspective on the extent of the catastrophe. Hundreds of square miles of Gloucestershire and the surrounding counties, were under water, far more than I could ever have appreciated from the ground. Obvious p ictures leapt up in front of me whole towns and villages turned into islands, a single church isolated by flood waters of biblical proportions, roads disappearing into water, and hundreds of caravans under water to their roof tops.

General views of the whole area struck me as the strongest images, yet flying as high as we could under the cloud cover, my 16mm lens was not wide enough to capture the whole area, where was my fisheye? Safe and sound in the boot of my car at the heliport. However the resultant images were dramatic enough however to be the big front page pictures on three UK national newspapers the following day.

By the next day as the water continued to rise, the story had become the victims of the flooding and the potential for greater misery caused by the risk of failure of electricity and fresh water supplies. There were reports of flooded electricity sub-stations and water pumping installations being desperately defended from the advancing water by the fire service and army.  So it was back up in the helicopter, this time with the fisheye. On the way back to the airfield we hovered for a moment and I was able to shoot the whole vista in splendid fish-bowl curviness, which I am delighted to say was again widely used by the papers despite any anxiety I may have harboured about having missed my moment. 

(Pictures by Darren Staples and Stephen Hird respectively)

Stephen Hird is a Reuters photographer based in London.