‘It’s pretty grim’: Tunbridge Wells residents struggle through several days without water – again

People arrive to collect bottled water from a water station in Tunbridge Wells, as Kent and parts of Sussex experience yet more water outages. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

As the residents of Tunbridge Wells trudged down their sodden high street in the pouring rain, the idea that they had run out of water – for the second time in just a few weeks – seemed farcical.

At the end of November the local water treatment centre, which had been flagged as at risk by the regulator in 2024, was forced to shut down, leaving 24,000 households without water for two weeks. The Drinking Water Inspectorate later said this outage was foreseen and was due to a lack of maintenance at the site.