Yes. On paper, nearly all of Canning Town sits in the highest river-and-sea flood zone. Once climate change is factored in, almost every postcode is in it. The defences carry nearly all of the protection. Count them, and only a handful of properties are at high risk, none of them homes. Most homes are protected, but only because of the defences.
On the Environment Agency's maps, about 96% of Canning Town's postcodes fall in Flood Zone 3, the high-probability band for flooding from rivers and the sea. Fewer than 1% fall in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability fringe outside it, which is so small because there is very little ground left over once Zone 3 has taken its share. These zones show the land as though the flood defences were not there. Before the nineteenth century this district was mostly marsh, reachable only by boat or a toll bridge, and the flood map is drawn on the ground as it was then.
Canning Town has no figure for surface water on its own. Rain flooding is counted only inside the combined postcode measure further down, together with river and sea flooding.
Once the Environment Agency allows for climate change, its zone mapping puts about 99% of postcodes inside the river-and-sea flood zones. That leaves the higher ground in Canning Town at almost nothing.
Insurers look at the address, and a postcode in Flood Zone 3 gets more questions than one outside it, whatever is protecting it. A flat on an upper floor and a ground-floor home on the same street can get very different answers. Get an indicative buildings-and-contents quote on the exact flat while the conveyancing is still at an early stage, because a quote that comes back expensive is far easier to take into account at that point than after exchange. The tower brochures lead with the views across the dock. The insurer is looking at the same water.
A wider postcode measure counts a postcode if it rates high, medium or low on at least one of several indicators, surface water included. On that basis, about 7% of postcodes are high on at least one, 14% medium and 37% low. This measure picks up a different set of risks from the zone figures, which is why the two numbers are so far apart.
The most useful figures are the counts of individual properties. The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea assessment covers 21,498 properties across the postcodes that carry any risk at all, and it puts 13 at high risk, none at medium, 609 at low and about 19,400 at very low. None of those 13 high-risk properties is a home. Postcodes with no risk at all are not in the count, so the very-low pile is bigger than this list shows.
That count looks so calm next to the flood zone because of the defences. In the Environment Agency's modelled flood extents, about 44% of postcodes fall inside the high-probability extent when the defences are left out, and none at all once they are counted. A defence being present in the model tells you something stands between the river and the house. It does not tell you the house is safe. The last flood on the agency's record here came from the sea in 1953, when the water went over the defences.
The nearest tide gauge in the record is at Dover, where the sea rose about 2.2 millimetres a year between 1961 and 2010. That is the measured rate at that gauge over those years, and nothing more.
Flood risk is Canning Town's weakest point. Almost the whole district sits on a floodplain, and what keeps it dry is a line of engineering that a buyer has no say over.