Earl's Court has a moderate flood risk, and it comes from rainfall, not the river. River and sea flooding barely reaches the place. Heavy downpours are a different story for about one postcode in ten. Nothing on record says it has flooded. Whether a home is at risk depends mostly on how far below the pavement it is.
The Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones barely touch Earl's Court. Under 1% of the area's postcodes are in Flood Zone 3, the highest-probability band, and none are in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it. The only watercourse in the area's history, the insanitary Counter's Creek, was dug into the Kensington Canal from 1826 and later gave way to a railway. Earl's Court converted its river into transport long before anyone worried about it.
With the river-and-sea zones this empty, the risk the wider indicators pick up here is mostly surface water, which is rain arriving faster than the drains can take it away. In a district of tall terraces and hard surfaces, that water collects at the lowest point on the street. If the flat you are looking at is below street level, put the exact address into the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service and read the surface water result, not just the river one.
The Environment Agency's climate-adjusted mapping puts about 3% of Earl's Court's postcodes inside the river-and-sea zone once future change is allowed for. That shows how the modelled zone grows under a changing climate. It gives no date for any flood, and even on that measure the zone stays small.
Insurers price surface-water risk street by street. A top-floor flat and a lower-ground flat in the same house can get quite different quotes. Ask for a quote early on any flat below ground level, because that is the one where the answer can change the sums.
Count every flood measure together, surface water included, and about 10% of Earl's Court's postcodes are high risk on at least one of them. About 18% are medium on at least one, and about 52% low on at least one. The figures count a postcode once it trips any single measure, so they describe how widely some exposure reaches. They do not say how much water any one street should expect.
The Environment Agency's modelled flood extents put none of the area's postcodes in a high-risk extent, whether undefended or with a defence present in the model. Here that means the modelled water does not reach far enough for defences to come up. It is still a model of the river and the sea, and it has nothing to say about a blocked drain at the bottom of the road.
The nearest tide gauge in the national record is at Portsmouth. It measured sea level rising by about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. That is a long way from Earl's Court, and the rate describes the record at that gauge, nothing more.
No historic flooding is recorded anywhere in Earl's Court. That is reassuring. It also means only that nothing made it into the official record, and surface-water floods are the kind that often go unreported.
The rivers and the sea are not a worry for Earl's Court. A heavy summer storm and a basement doorstep could be, which puts the flood risk around the middle: fine for most flats, and worth checking on the lowest ones.