Mostly no, with a hard exception for the valley floor. The River Erme runs straight through the middle of the town, and the town was built around it. Roughly one in ten postcodes carries a high rating on at least one flood measure. Nearly nine in ten carry none at all. This is not a flood town, but it is a town with a flood strip through the middle of it, and the difference between those two things is about four streets wide.
On rivers and the sea, the Environment Agency's mapping puts about 2% of the area's postcodes in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band, and about 7% in flood zone 2, which is the additional medium-probability fringe sitting beyond zone 3 rather than a larger band containing it. That is the standard measure a lender or a solicitor will reach for first. It is also the narrowest one, because it deals only with water arriving from a river or the sea.
Surface water is folded in alongside rivers and sea in the postcode-level indicators rather than published separately here, so no standalone surface-water share exists for the town. What does exist is a history: 13 recorded flood events, the most recent dating to 1979, logged as a main river event where channel capacity was exceeded with no raised defences present. A town on a river that drops from 300 feet to 130 feet as it passes through does not need much rain to produce a fast response.
Looking forward, the climate-adjusted zone rises to about 16% of postcodes. That is the same mapping with allowances applied for a wetter century, and it roughly doubles the footprint of the river-and-sea zones. Anyone buying near the water is buying the 16% version, not the 2% version.
For insurance, this is an address-level question and not a town-level one. Insurers and lenders price the specific property against the specific mapping, so the sensible move is an indicative quote before instructing a solicitor rather than after. A neighbour's premium tells you nothing useful if their front door sits a metre higher than yours.
Across all measures combined, about 11% of postcodes rate high on at least one flood indicator, about 11% medium and about 35% low. Those bands include surface water alongside rivers and sea, they overlap with the zone figures rather than adding to them, and the low band in particular sweeps in a lot of ground where nothing has ever come through a door.
The more useful number is homes. Counting properties rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists 713 properties across the 36 postcodes that carry any risk at all: 113 at high risk, 18 at medium and 77 at low. Of the high-risk properties, 98 are residential. Postcodes with no risk do not appear in that list at all, which is why the total looks small against a town of this size.
On whether anything stands between the water and the house, about 3% of postcodes sit inside the high-risk extent with a defence present in the model, and about 3% sit inside it with none. A defence appearing in a model is not a promise that a house stays dry. It means an asset exists and has been accounted for, which is a different claim entirely.
Every postcode here falls under a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy over the twenty, fifty and hundred-year horizons is no active intervention. The coast is about four kilometres away, so that policy governs the estuary and shoreline rather than the town's own river. A policy is an intention about future maintenance, not a defence that exists today.
At the nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, the measured sea level trend across the 1962 to 2015 record runs at 2.35 millimetres a year. That is a recorded historic rate rather than a projection.
Flood risk here sits in the middle of the range: a genuine and mapped exposure for a few hundred homes along the Erme, and close to nothing for everyone else. The town-wide answer is comfortable. The address-level answer is the only one worth paying for.