Buxted is mostly dry, with a few wet corners worth finding before you buy. Hardly any of it sits in the river flood zone. About one postcode in ten carries a high risk on at least one measure once surface water is counted. Only a handful of homes are in the top risk band from rivers. The risk is small and local, which is exactly why buyers skip checking it.
In the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 1% of the area's postcodes sit in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band, and none sit in flood zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it. For a parish with tributaries of both the Rother and the Cuckmere running through it, that is a small footprint. The area has one recorded flood event, in October 2000, when a watercourse's channel overflowed where there were no raised defences. Water here follows the valley floors, not the whole village.
Surface water is where the zone maps stop helping. Rain that can't drain fast enough off roads, fields and gardens doesn't respect a river-zone boundary, and it is the part of the risk a quick glance at the flood-zone map will miss. The postcode indicators below fold it in.
Looking ahead, the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted flood zone covers about 1% of postcodes, the same small share as today's highest zone. On that measure the river footprint isn't expected to spread across the village.
For insurance, the exposure sits with specific properties rather than the whole area. A house on a postcode with no flagged risk should quote like anywhere else. A house on one of the flagged postcodes may be a different conversation, and the time to find that out is before the survey, not after exchange. Get a quote on the exact address early. The vendor's "never had a problem" is a memory, not a flood model.
At postcode level, about 10% of the area's postcodes rate high on at least one flood measure, 6% medium and 18% low. These indicators include surface water alongside rivers and sea, so they overlap with the zone figures above and are not added to them. They measure a different thing, and they are the reason a village with almost nothing in the river zone still has streets worth checking.
The property count is the more useful figure. On the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea risk mapping, only 5 postcodes in the area carry any risk at all, covering 144 properties. Of those, 7 are at high risk, 5 at medium and 5 at low, and 5 of the high-risk properties are homes. That is a small list, and for anyone buying one of them it's the only list that matters.
On defences, about 1% of postcodes fall inside the high-risk extent without defences in the model, and the same 1% with a defence present in the model. "Defended" means only that the model accounts for a defence being there. It says nothing about whether that defence holds on the night, and it is not a reason to skip the searches.
The nearest tide gauge, at Dover, recorded sea level rising by about 2 millimetres a year over its 1961 to 2010 record. That is a measured historic rate, not a forecast, and for an inland Weald village the sea is not the flood risk worth losing sleep over. The streams are.
Flood risk in Buxted is middling. Most of the village has little to worry about, and a small number of addresses on a few postcodes carry all of it. Know which side of that line your house is on before you make an offer.