When Andrew Ivett retired to bed on Monday evening, with the ground floor of his house covered in only three inches of water, he thought he had escaped the worst.

At 3am, he was woken by the emergency services thumping on the door. Overnight the surge of floodwater, which most people in Oxford believed had been and gone, had finally arrived.

Around 250 properties have been evacuated in west central Oxford. Most sought refuge with friends but 35 people, including Mr Ivett, were plucked from their homes by inflatable dinghy and taken to the city's emergency centre at Kassam Football stadium, bringing the total who have sought refuge there since the floods started to 105.

Mr Ivett said: "The water had already started to drop, so we thought that perhaps it had already peaked. Everything was balanced on saucepans above three or four inches of water, and things seemed to have stabilised.

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"The next thing I knew there was all this knocking and banging around and a whole posse of firefighters said it was getting worse. It had gone from being mildly squelchy to swimming up to the second step of my staircase."

Mr Ivett, 56, said he considered staying at his home on Earl Street, like some of his neighbours, until he realised that the power would soon cut out. "That was the clincher. I didn’t want to be marooned in the dark."

Mr Ivett and his neighbour, Kenneth Inness, 69, clambered aboard the inflatable dinghy and were towed to a coach, which delivered them, sodden and shaken, to their temporary home at the football ground.

"It was quite frightening. The firefighters in all their gear with their headlamps on looked like a load of fireflies in the dark," said Mr Inness. "It was eerie. I thought, ‘This isn’t happening'."

The numbers taking refuge in Oxford football stadium are expected to grow during the day as tributaries feeding the Thames spill over on to the river’s already waterlogged flood plain. Geoff Bell, from the Environment Agency (EA), said that the river was expected to rise about an inch this morning.

The EA said many homes in the north of Oxford had been saved from flooding by the Kidlington Flood Defence Scheme. But in flooded areas of the city water levels are expected to remain high for the next 24 hours and match levels seen in the December 2003 floods.

Further downstream, river levels are expected to peak in Wallingford and flooding is predicted to start in Henley this afternoon. Pangbourne and Purley are bracing themselves for a peak this evening and flooding is expected to start in Reading and Caversham tonight.

The flood peak is forecast to reach Marlow, Staines and Shepperton later in the week but with only limited flooding. The towns of Windsor, Eton and Maidenhead will be protected from the flood waters by the Jubilee and Cookham flood defences, said the EA.

In Gloucestershire, where the river Severn has already started to recede in the worst hit areas, the lack of clean water was raising growing concerns about sanitation and health.

Mythe water treatment works, near Tewkesbury, which normally supplies clean drinking water to 140,000 households, became submerged over the weekend.

The emergency services started pumping water from the site yesterday, but engineers have yet to assess the scale of the damage. Severn Trent Water, which owns the works, said that electricity had been restored to part of the plant, but warned it would be several days before repairs could start.

More than 340,000 people in the country have been told they will not have access to water in their homes for up to two weeks and are relying on bowsers and bottled water.

The company has set up 926 bowsers around Tewkesbury, Gloucester and Cheltenham which are being refilled five times a day. There have been complaints that the bowsers are quickly running dry. Large queues have formed at the distribution centres where the Army is helping to distribute four million litres of bottled water across the area.

Gordon Brown will visit some of the affected areas this afternoon, accompanied by the MPs for Gloucester and Tewkesbury, he told Prime Minister’s Questions.

David Drew, Labour MP for Stroud, challenged Mr Brown that it "cannot be right" that his constituents had been told they faced a 14-day wait for water supplies to be restored.

But the Prime Minister insisted that everything possible was being done. "All the civil engineering capacity that can be brought to bear is being brought to bear to stop what is a situation where the waterworks were polluted and therefore there is a danger that the water that is pouring out from there would contaminate local people.

"We have made it clear to Severn Trent water company that it has got to provide the bowsers for the area - 900 have already been provided. Drinking water is being provided through the retail stores.

"I think the company has discharged its duty in making sure that that water is available. Obviously we want the Mythe water station back as quickly as possible.”

Yesterday, the Government pledged a further £10 million to help battle the floods - in addition to the £14 million initially promised by Mr Brown earlier this month.

The flood refugees in Oxford are trying to reestablish some kind of order to their lives. A handful of the viewing boxes at Oxford's Kassam Stadium have been taken over as temporary bedrooms by the frail and those with young families.

Others have had to lay out sleeping bags on the sofas of the communal areas during the night, and occupy themselves with playing cards and crosswords as scheduled business meetings continue in the conference rooms next door.

The elderly residents of two care homes from the Abingdon area, and two young women with young children, have taken up temporary residence in the neighbouring Holiday Inn Express.

John Kelly, the emergency planning officer in charge of services at the stadium, has not slept for 27 hours. He said around 100 staff and volunteers had been recruited to covers shifts. The stadium has been booked until Friday.

Flooded residents have praised the care and support of emergency workers, who have been providing food, drinks and arranging prescriptions since the first wave of people arrived on Thursday. They are also organising transport to the city council where residents can apply for crisis loans.

However, it is unlikely that many of them will find free access to Friday’s friendly between Bournemouth and Oxford United enough to compensate for the loss of their homes.

Police said there was no immediate risk to the sub-power station at Ferry Hinksey Road but added that the situation was being monitored closely.

Just off the Botley Road near the city centre, streets turned to rivers 3ft-4ft deep. People making their way to work were forced to negotiate large lakes dotted along the main route, some cycling in bare feet while others wading in wellingtons.

At the severely-flooded George Inn pub on Botley Road, a defiant sign erected outside said: "Open for business - come hell or high water."

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