Caddington has no river or sea flood risk on the official maps, and a fair amount of risk from rain. None of the village's postcodes are in a river or sea flood zone. More than a quarter carry a high-risk flag on at least one measure. Nothing has been recorded flooding here. The water to worry about is the kind that falls out of the sky and runs down the road.
The Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones don't reach Caddington at all. 0% of the area's postcodes are in Flood Zone 3, the highest-probability band, and 0% are in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability fringe that lies beyond it. Those zones measure rivers and the sea and nothing else. A village with no main river running through it was always going to come up blank.
Surface water is another matter. With the river-and-sea zones empty, the high and medium flags further down come from the other measures, surface water among them. Rain that can't soak into the ground fast enough runs off and collects on roads and in the lowest gardens. That kind of flooding can catch a house well away from any river.
The Environment Agency's climate-adjusted flood zone, which redraws the river-and-sea zones for a wetter future, also covers 0% of Caddington's postcodes. Even the version allowing for climate change finds nothing for a river to do here.
For insurance, empty flood zones help, though insurers look at more than rivers. Many now price at address level and include surface-water risk, so a house on a flagged postcode can draw more questions than the river maps suggest. Getting an insurance quote on the exact address early on costs nothing and settles it.
The broader postcode picture adds the other measures to rivers and sea. Counting any one of several flood indicators, including surface water, about 27% of Caddington's postcodes rate high on at least one, about 30% medium and about 48% low. A postcode can turn up in more than one of those bands. "Not in a flood zone" is accurate for every house in the village and leaves a quarter of them out of the conversation that matters. The government's long-term flood risk check gives the surface-water rating for a single address, and that's the result to read for the house you want.
The question of defences never comes up. In the Environment Agency's modelled flood extents, 0% of postcodes fall in the high-risk extent, defended or undefended, and none in the low-risk undefended extent either. There's no river flood here for a wall to hold back, so a "defended" label has nothing to do.
The nearest tide gauge on the record is at Portsmouth, where sea level rose by about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. Portsmouth is the nearest gauge to a village in the Bedfordshire chalk, which tells you how much the sea features in Caddington's flood picture.
There is no recorded history of flooding in the area. That is reassuring, but only as far as it goes. Small surface-water floods on a single street often never make it into anyone's records.
Caddington's flood risk is worse than its empty river maps make it look. The risk comes from rain, and a quarter of the village's postcodes are flagged high for it.