Yes, and seriously. Most of Datchet's postcodes fall in the highest river flood zone. Allowing for climate change, nearly all of them do. Close to two thousand properties are rated at high risk. The Thames is the reason the village exists, and it is also the first thing a buyer here has to price in.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 63% of postcodes across the Datchet area are in Flood Zone 3, the band with the highest chance of flooding. Another 21% are in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability fringe outside it. The two bands do not overlap, so Zone 2 is the narrower strip at the edge and Zone 3 covers most of the village.
The Agency has no separate surface-water share on this page. Rain that cannot drain away is counted in the postcode indicators further down, and the Agency's records hold 253 recorded flood events for the area. A village on a river floodplain gets the river and the drains both.
The Agency's climate-change version of the flood zones puts about 88% of postcodes inside a zone. That is a modelled look ahead, and it leaves very little of the village on the dry side of the line.
Insurance is where this turns into money. Cover on a home in the higher zones is likely to cost more, carry a larger flood excess, or need a specialist insurer, and the price depends on the house, its floor level and its claims record. Ask the seller for the home's buildings insurance history, including any flood claims, and get your own quote using the exact address while the survey is being booked.
A wider postcode measure folds surface water in alongside rivers and sea, and counts a postcode as high if any one of those indicators puts it there. On that basis about 56% of postcodes in the Datchet area are at high risk on at least one measure, about 55% at medium and about 45% at low. A single postcode can appear in more than one of those groups, which is why they add up to more than the whole.
Counting homes is more useful than counting postcodes. The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists about 5,000 properties in the area, of which 1,879 are at high risk, 1,048 at medium, 824 at low and 607 at very low. Only postcodes carrying some risk appear in that list at all. The properties left out are the ones with nothing to report.
Then there is the question of what stands between the river and the house. About 56% of postcodes fall inside the Agency's high-risk extent when defences are ignored, and about 54% when they are included. "Defended" in the model means a defence is present on the map. It says nothing about whether the water stays out of a particular kitchen, and the gap between those two percentages is small enough that the defences change the map very little.
The nearest tide gauge on record is at Portsmouth, where sea level rose at about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. That is a coastal gauge describing the sea. Datchet's water comes down the Thames.
Flood risk is the weakest thing about Datchet by some distance, and every buyer here is choosing how much of it to carry.