Twice a month, the sun and the moon line up so that both exert a gravitational pull on the sea. The result is unusually high tides, called "spring" tides. If these are combined with high winds and low air pressure, allowing water to rise even higher, the result can be a "storm surge" with disastrous flooding. 

One town repeatedly hit by floods was Dunwich in East Anglia, which was one of the largest ports in England in the 13th century. Big storms in 1286, 1328 and 1347 swept a quarter of the town into the sea. By the 16th century, all of Dunwich's eight churches had gone. People say that, at certain tides, you can still hear their bells ringing from beneath the waves.

England's worst flooding in living memory took place in January 1953, when a storm surge devastated five eastern counties, and swamped low-lying Canvey Island in Essex, where 307 people lost their lives. Some 24,000 homes were damaged or destroyed and 30,000 people had to be evacuated.

Great Storm

The most destructive storm on record took place on December 7-8, 1703. Daniel Defoe collected accounts of the disaster in his first book, The Great Storm (1704), in which he wrote, "No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it."

Hundreds of ships were sunk, with around 10,000 sailors killed at sea. Buildings were blown down across southern England, including 400 windmills. Three cathedrals were damaged, and the newly built wooden Eddystone lighthouse destroyed. In Kent, the storm was accompanied by tornadoes which lifted a ship out of the water, depositing it 800ft from the water's edge, and left a cow in the topmost branches of a tree.

The worst storm to hit England since 1703 took place on October 16, 1987, when gale force winds tore down 15 million trees, blocking roads and railways. Power lines were also toppled, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without electricty for 24 hours. BBC weatherman Michael Fish was criticised for saying, "'A lady has rung in to ask if there is going to be a hurricane tonight. There is not!" In fact, Fish was correct, for a true hurricane has far stronger winds and would cause even worse damage.

Read the Met Office report on the Great Storm of 1987

The great blizzard

Winter storms accompanied by heavy snowfall are called blizzards. Between March 9-13, 1891, gale-force winds combined with a severe snowstorm to produce one of the worst blizzards to hit England and Wales. Sheets of snow were carried by easterly winds, settling to a depth of 11ft in London. In Devon, 14 trains were buried under snow, and 220 people were killed, most of them on the 65 ships that sank during the night.

The blizzard arrived so suddenly that shepherds had no time to round up their sheep. Several days later, shepherds went out to look for them, prodding the snow with long sticks. Although 6,000 animals died, thousands more were brought out alive, saved by their thick woolly coats.

Year without a summer

In April 1815, a huge volcano at Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa erupted, sending masses of volcanic dust into the upper atmosphere. This circled the earth, causing beautiful red sunrises and sunsets, inspiring several paintings by the artist JMW Turner. The dust also blocked out a third of the sun's heat. This led to a bitterly cold summer in 1816, with July snowdrifts, continuous rain, and severe frosts in August and September. Across northern Europe, crops failed and there were food riots. 1816 was later remembered as the "year without a summer".

Mary Shelley, holidaying by Lake Geneva, was inspired by the wretched weather to write Frankenstein, a story told to entertain her companions, forced to stay indoors by the continuous rain. Lord Byron, who was also there, wrote a poem called Darkness:

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air

Droughts

England also occasionally suffers from droughts, long periods without rain leading to summer water shortages. There were prolonged droughts in 1868, 1887, 1921 and 1976. Many will remember the hot summer of 1976, when the temperature remained in the 30s for weeks on end, and the dry weather was accompanied by a plague of biting ladybirds.

Read Martin Wainwright's report in the Guardian on the Great Drought of 1976