The UK will see showers over the coming days but the rain is “not going to solve the drought situation overnight”, a forecaster has said.

Some areas in the country will have the “first meaningful rain for a long time” this week, the Met Office said, after a summer of heatwaves and dry weather have left many areas facing water shortages.

However, they said the rainfall would not be a “huge amount” and “highly hit and miss from place to place”, before conditions became drier again over the weekend.

Met Office data showed up to 23mm of rain fell in parts of central southern Lancashire in the 12 hours to 6am on Wednesday, with up to 13mm recorded in parts of Northern Ireland and between 6-10mm across south-west England.

In an online forecast, Met Office meteorologist Aidan McGivern said Wednesday would be a “very showery day” across the UK, with Northern Ireland and areas in western and central Scotland seeing “frequent showers with heavy downpours, hail and thunder”.

The showers would be “fewer and further between” in southern areas, while central England and eastern Wales could still see some downpours, the forecaster added.

He said: “I suspect many people across England and Wales will at least enjoy the feel of some rain falling out of the sky during the next few days, but it’s not going to solve the drought situation overnight because we’re not expecting huge amounts and it will be highly variable because a lot of it will come in the form of showers.”

On Wednesday, highs of 25C in London, 20C in Cardiff, 19C in Manchester and 16C in Glasgow are expected, according to the weather service.

Thursday will begin with some “very heavy rain” across parts of northern England and north and west Wales with frequent showers in the southwest, Mr McGivern said.

That afternoon will bring a “better chance” of showers further south and “dumping a reasonable amount of rain in places”, he added.

“But again, because they’re showers, it will be hit and miss, very speckled in nature,” he said.

Temperatures will be below average for a large part of the UK on Thursday,  which is “something we’ve seen on only a handful of days this summer,” the forecaster continued.

A hosepipe ban began for all of Wessex Water’s 1.4 million customers across areas in Bath, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire on Tuesday.

It is the first ban the company has put in place for 50 years, since the summer of 1976.

Meanwhile, Thames Water has urged its customers to continue to reduce water usage as it said household demand has fallen by 3% across London and more than 6% across the Thames Valley and home counties since it introduced a hosepipe ban on July 23.

In an update on Tuesday, the utility said London reservoir storage was at 74%, which is lower than the firm would expect for this time of year but the Farmoor Reservoir in Oxfordshire was 92% full.

According to the company, rainfall in the Thames catchment area during July was less than 1mm, which is just 2% of the long-term average, while customers used about 100 million litres more water every day than normal, putting more pressure on rivers, reservoirs and the water network.

More than 27 million people across England have now had hosepipe use restricted in their area after months of hot and dry weather.

The cooler and wetter conditions come after the UK’s fifth heatwave of the summer, during which the hottest day of the year was recorded in Kew Gardens, London, on Thursday when temperature reached 38.1C.