Thousands of lightning strikes light up sky across southern England

Ligntning flashes over Wapping in London in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

The storms rolled into the south west on Monday evening and moved towards the south east during the night, with people reporting being woken up in the early hours by loud crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning.

London Fire Brigade said it responded to 400 calls overnight, including two house fires believed to be caused by lightning strikes, while a house in Bristol was set ablaze during a storm earlier in the evening.

It comes as England braces for temperatures of up to 40C, with the Met Office issuing a rare red alert set to come into force on Wednesday.

Met Office data suggests there were 29,000 lightning strikes in a 24-hour period, with some very heavy rain in some areas leading to flash flooding.

The intense thunderstorms developed due to a couple of factors.

The first is that it was very warm if not hot across southern England on Monday afternoon and temperatures soared into the high 20s and low 30s.

This heat transfers into the atmosphere, giving it a lot of energy. That energy is then primed for a trigger to covert it into big cumulonimbus - thunder - clouds.

The trigger was an atmospheric disturbance higher in the atmosphere - which essentially allowed all that stored energy to be released, resulting in the intense thunderstorms.

The storms travelled across the south of England from Monday evening into the early hours of Tuesday

The overnight storm caused flash-flooding, such as here in Hammersmith, London

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The London skyline was dominated by flashes of lightning in the early hours of Tuesday morning

Lightning bolts lit up the night sky in Hornchurch, Greater London

Forks of lightning could be seen above Bath on Monday evening