Kentish Town has almost no river or sea flood risk and a real problem with rain. None of its postcodes is in a river or sea flood zone. About one postcode in five is still rated high risk on at least one flood measure. Rain that can't drain away fast enough is what puts them there. The water to worry about here falls out of the sky.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea mapping, 0% of Kentish Town's postcodes are in Flood Zone 3, the highest-probability band, and 0% are in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability fringe outside it. The River Fleet is the only river the place has ever had, and it now runs underground. That leaves nothing above ground to burst its banks.
The flood risk that matters here is surface water, which happens when heavy rain arrives faster than the drains and the ground can take it. River and sea flooding account for none of Kentish Town's postcodes, so the high ratings described below come from the Environment Agency's other measures, surface water among them. Surface water depends on the street. A basement flat at the bottom of a slope and a top-floor flat on the same street don't share a flood risk, whatever their postcode says.
Allowing for climate change makes no difference to the river-and-sea picture. On the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted flood zones, 0% of postcodes are affected.
Insurance should be easier here than in a river town, because insurers price river and sea flooding heavily and there is none of it to price. Surface water is the part they ask about. A garden-level or basement flat on a street the mapping flags can get a different quote from the flat two floors up. For any address on your shortlist, look up the surface-water risk in the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service, and get an insurance quote on that address early on.
Counting every flood measure together, rivers, sea and surface water included, about 20% of Kentish Town's postcodes are rated high risk on at least one of them, about 18% medium and about 65% low. A postcode only needs to score badly on one measure to appear in a band. That means these shares cross over with each other, and they are a different count from the flood-zone figures above.
The question of defences barely applies. In the Environment Agency's modelled high-probability flood extents, 0% of postcodes sit behind a defence and 0% sit without one, because the modelled river-and-sea water doesn't reach Kentish Town in the first place. A defence that appears in the model would not mean a house was safe, and here there is nothing for one to hold back.
The nearest tide gauge in the record is at Portsmouth, where the sea rose by about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. That gauge being the nearest one says how little the sea has to do with Kentish Town.
The Environment Agency's records show no historic flooding anywhere in Kentish Town, with 0% of the area touched by a recorded flood. That is good news, though it only covers floods somebody wrote down, and a burst of summer rain on one street rarely gets recorded.
For flood risk, Kentish Town comes in below average. The reason is the surface-water ratings on about a fifth of its postcodes, since river and sea flooding play no part here.