Storms set to blow out

The torrential rain and high winds which caused chaos across southeast England will ease off from today, say weather forecasters.

The appalling conditions caused at least four deaths on the roads.

A Jaguar driver died instantly when a camper van was blown on top of his vehicle by a huge gust of wind during a torrential rainstorm at Beddingham, near Lewes in East Sussex.

The driver of the van, a 60-year-old man, was taken to the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton with fractures to his hip, leg, knee and ankle.

Meanwhile, two people were killed and one critically injured when a car slewed across a central reservation and crashed head-on into another vehicle near Caterham in Surrey. The injured, who included a 65-year-old woman with chest injuries and another woman with a fractured skull, were rushed to the East Surrey hospital at Redhill.

Police are trying to establish whether a motorcyclist in his mid-twenties, found dead at the roadside in Long Ditton, near Surbiton, was a hit-and-run victim or had been blown from his machine. In Brighton, high winds uprooted trees and sent traffic lights flying.

Sussex paramedics answered calls to numerous collisions and overturned cars, including one at Wiston, near Steyning in West Sussex, which left the driver trapped. Flooding closed the high street in Swanage, Dorset, and the Victorian Gardens in Bournemouth were under three feet of water after a sixth of the month's average rainfall fell in one hour.

Over an inch fell in Enfield, nearly half of it in a single hour.

Railtrack said that services around the capital were delayed at Alexandra Palace, Maryland, Dalston Junction and Kingsland Junction after the downpours but none of the stations had to be closed.

Sean Seabrook at the Met Office said the rain had come in from the Continent. "There were particularly heavy downfalls in both east and west London," he said, but predicted improvements from today with dry, bright weather and temperatures rising to 23C by the weekend.