It was curious walking around Chiltern Woods in October - it had been really rather dry for a couple of months, but nevertheless the ground was very muddy. It seems that the conditions were insufficient to drain away or evaporate such due and light rain as had occurred, so the ground was very wet.

The graphic in the BBC article tells me that the Chilterns have had about 80-90% of our normal rainfall, which is consistent with what my rain-gauge tells me. Nevertheless the River Chess in nearby Chesham has completely dried up, so I suspect that it is at least partly to do with timing of the rainfall - there was a rather wet patch in the summer, which won't get into the water table, but then a very dry autumn. However this timing did substantially reduce watering demand on the garden, as one doesn't do much watering in late summer/autumn.

London itself hasn't been unusually dry. The more unusually dry areas have been a very large part of central England, and also the far SE (Kent, East Sussex). Even there, 70% of normal rainfall probably doesn't feel specially dry, but the extent of the area having only 70% or less has a large cumulative effect on the quantity of water resources available, especially in a country where water consumption isn't very different from water landing - we get away with that by recycling water from sewage works back into the system.