Cranbrook is not a flood town, but it is not a bone-dry one either. Only a sliver of postcodes sit in the river-and-sea flood zones. Rather more pick up a high rating once surface water is folded in. Nothing here is coastal, whatever the word Devon does to the imagination. The risk is rainwater with nowhere to go, which is the least dramatic kind of flooding there is and still perfectly capable of ruining a kitchen.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea mapping, about 1% of the area's postcodes fall in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band, and under 1% fall in flood zone 2. Those two are separate bands rather than nested ones: zone 2 is the extra medium-probability fringe sitting outside zone 3, which is why it can be the smaller of the two without anything being wrong. Either way, the river corridor here is narrow and most of the town is nowhere near it.
Surface water is the different animal, and it is the one that does not respect the river corridor at all. It arrives when a downpour beats the drainage rather than when a watercourse tops its banks, which means it can turn up on ground that looks entirely sensible on a map. The postcode-level indicators used on this site fold surface water in alongside rivers and sea, and they are what lift the numbers above the flood-zone shares.
Looking forward, the Environment Agency's climate change allowance pushes the share of postcodes inside a flood zone up to about 2%. That is a modelled future rather than a forecast of any particular winter, and it is still a small share of a town of this size.
For insurance, the practical effect is that most addresses here will be underwritten without anyone asking a second question, and a small number will not. Cover and excesses are set address by address rather than town by town, so the sensible move is an indicative quote on the specific property before anything gets signed, not a general assumption based on the postcode district.
Taking every measure together, about 15% of the area's postcodes rate high on at least one flood indicator, about 12% rate medium, and about 30% rate low. Those bands overlap with the flood-zone shares rather than adding to them, because a postcode can appear in both counts. The at-least-one framing is deliberately pessimistic by design, which is exactly what you want from a screening measure and exactly what you should not read as a verdict on your street.
The property-level count is the more useful number. Across the 11 postcodes that carry any river-and-sea risk at all, the Environment Agency's mapping identifies 232 properties, of which 16 sit at high risk, 14 at medium and 32 at low. Twelve of the high-risk ones are residential. Postcodes with no risk do not appear in that list at all, so this is a count of the exposed, not a count of the town.
On whether anything stands between the water and the building, about 1% of postcodes sit inside a modelled high-probability extent where a defence is present in the model, and under 1% sit inside one with no defence modelled at all. A defence appearing in a model is not a promise that a house stays dry. It is a statement that something has been built, is assumed to work, and is assumed to be maintained, and all three of those assumptions have failed somewhere in this country at some point.
Every postcode here falls under a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy across the twenty, fifty and hundred year horizons is managed realignment. That is an intention about how the coast will be handled, not a guarantee and not a defence that already exists. The nearest coastline sits about 3.9 kilometres from the closest postcode, with a median of about 6.4 kilometres, so the coastal question here is one of catchment rather than of waves at the door.
At the nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, the measured record from 1962 to 2015 shows sea level rising at about 2.35 millimetres a year. That is a historic rate from an actual instrument, not a projection.
Flooding here sits in the middle of the pack: a real risk for a small and identifiable set of properties, and close to a non-issue for everyone else. The number that matters is the one for the exact address, not the one for the town.