Yes, and more than most buyers expect from a town that feels nowhere near the sea. Around four in ten postcodes are in the highest river-and-sea flood zone. Half are rated high risk on at least one flood measure. Allow for the climate and the high-risk zone grows to about six in ten. Barking sits where the Roding meets the Thames, and the flood maps have read the geography correctly.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 40% of Barking's postcodes are in flood zone 3, the band with the highest chance of flooding from rivers or the sea. Another 8% are in zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond zone 3, so the two together cover close to half the postcodes. The low ground by the Roding and the old industrial land down to the Thames, including Creekmouth and Barking Riverside, is what the zones are drawn around.
Those zones say nothing about rain. Surface water, the flooding that comes from a heavy downpour the drains can't take, is a separate risk and is counted on a separate measure below. A house can be outside both river zones and still have water at the front door after a summer storm.
The Environment Agency also publishes a version of the zones with an allowance for climate change, and on that one about 62% of Barking's postcodes fall in the high-risk zone. That is a modelled scenario for a wetter future and higher rivers, and it is the version a lender looking twenty-five years ahead has every reason to care about.
Insurance follows the maps. A home in zone 3 can usually still be insured, but the premium and the excess tend to reflect the zone, and older homes generally have more options than recent new-builds. Get an indicative buildings quote for the exact address while the sale is still at the offer stage, because the insurer's view of the house is the one that turns up every year.
Counting postcodes across all the flood indicators together, rivers, sea and surface water, about 53% of Barking's postcodes are rated high risk on at least one of them, 45% medium on at least one, and 66% low on at least one. The shares overlap, since a postcode can be high on one measure and low on another, so they don't add up to anything. The point is that almost no part of Barking is clear on every measure at once.
Counting homes is more useful than counting postcodes. The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping covers 16,012 properties in Barking's at-risk postcodes, and only postcodes carrying some risk are included. Of those, 259 are at high risk, 182 of them homes, 526 at medium risk and 10,702 at low risk. Most of Barking's flood exposure is a large number of properties at low risk, not a small number in serious danger.
The defences do the heavy work here. Modelled without any flood defences, about 35% of postcodes fall inside the high-risk flood extent. Modelled with the defences in place, that drops to about 2%. "Defended" means a defence is present in the Environment Agency's model, and it says nothing about whether that defence holds on the night. The most recent recorded flood in Barking, in December 1987, came from the main river when the defences were overtopped. In the nineteenth century Barking's fishing trade made its ice by flooding local fields on purpose every winter. The flooding has been less welcome since.
The nearest tide gauge with a long record is at Dover, where sea level rose by about 2.2 millimetres a year between 1961 and 2010. That is the rate measured at that gauge over those decades, on the coast, and it is the background to a river town on a tidal estuary.
Flood risk is Barking's weakest point. Barking stays dry because something holds the water back, and any buyer should know which defence their street depends on and how much they would pay to insure against it failing.