Yes, Fulham is at serious risk of flooding, at least as the official maps draw it. About four in five postcodes fall in the highest river-and-sea flood zone. Allow for climate change and it is nearly all of them. The count of homes rated at high risk from the river is tiny, though. That gap between the map and the house is what every insurer and lender here will ask about.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea mapping, about 79% of Fulham's postcodes are in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band. Another 12% are in zone 2, the medium-probability fringe outside it. The name Fulham comes from Old English for Fulla's land hemmed in by water or marsh, and a thousand years later the flood map has reached the same conclusion.
Surface water has no figure of its own here. It is folded into the postcode measures further down. What the Environment Agency does record is history. About 12% of Fulham's postcodes are inside areas that have flooded before, across 174 recorded flood events, and the latest on the list is from January 1928, when the Thames, a main river, overtopped its defences.
Add the Environment Agency's allowance for climate change and the flood zone covers about 100% of Fulham's postcodes, short of total only before rounding. The view from the river walk stays the same, but the paperwork will change.
For insurance, a flood-zone postcode is the first thing an underwriter checks, and in Fulham almost every postcode has one. Cover and premiums depend on the individual property, so get a quote on the exact address early in the purchase, while it can still change your offer.
A wider measure of postcodes counts a postcode once if it rates high, medium or low on any of several flood measures, surface water included. On that basis about 14% of Fulham's postcodes are high on at least one, about 25% medium and about 49% low.
The Environment Agency's count of properties at risk from rivers and the sea tells a different story. Across the 383 Fulham postcodes that carry any risk at all, 10,895 properties are listed. Just 2 of them are rated high risk, none medium and none low, and 8,508 are very low. Postcodes with no risk are left out of the count, so it covers only the part of Fulham the agency thinks worth listing.
The flood extent model is less reassuring. About 11% of Fulham's postcodes fall inside the high-probability extent with no defence in the model, and none fall inside a defended high-probability extent. A defence appearing in a model would say only that a wall exists, and here the model does not credit even that. The very low property count and the undefended extent are both official, and a buyer living with both has to work out which one the insurer believes.
The nearest tide gauge on record is at Portsmouth, where the sea rose by about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. That is the rate measured on the south coast over those years. It is a long way to go to measure the Thames at Putney Bridge.
Flood risk is Fulham's worst problem. Nearly all of it is mapped as floodplain, and a low count of homes at risk is a thin thing to set against that.