Yes. On paper, Poplar is one of the more exposed places in London. Seven in ten postcodes are in the highest river-and-sea flood zone. Allow for climate change and that rises towards nine in ten. Yet only a couple of hundred properties are rated at high risk once the modelling gets down to individual buildings. The map and the street tell different stories, and the insurer reads the map.
The Environment Agency puts 71% of Poplar's postcodes in Flood Zone 3, its highest-probability band for flooding from rivers and the sea. Only a fraction of 1% fall in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it, so in Poplar a postcode is almost always either in the top zone or out of the zones altogether. The Thames lies on one side and the Lea on the other, with docks dug between them. Poplar grew where ships could get in, and water can get in the same way.
Surface water from heavy rain isn't reported as a separate figure here. It is included in the postcode-level measures below. What the records do give is history. About 27% of the area lies within the Environment Agency's recorded flood outlines, and the most recent recorded flood came in December 1947, when a main river overtopped the defences.
Under the agency's climate-change projection, the share of postcodes in the flood zones rises to 88%. On that projection, the dry part of Poplar is a small minority.
Insurers price from these maps, so a postcode in Flood Zone 3 tends to mean more questions and higher premiums, whatever the flat's floor level. Get an insurance quote on the exact address early in the process, and before the survey, because the quote will tell you more than the particulars do.
Measured another way, Poplar's postcodes can be rated on several flood measures at once, including surface water as well as rivers and the sea. On that basis, about 5% of postcodes rate high on at least one of them, 10% medium and 23% low. A postcode only needs one high reading to count as high, so this measure is broader and covers different ground from the flood-zone shares.
Counted by building, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping rates 206 properties at high risk, none at medium or low, and 25,340 at very low. Those figures come from 28,646 properties in the postcodes that carry some risk; postcodes with no risk are left out of the count altogether. Of the 206 high-risk properties, 200 are homes. Poplar's flood risk is binary: a couple of hundred properties at the sharp end, the great majority rated very low, and nothing in between.
About 27% of postcodes fall inside the agency's modelled high-probability flood extent with no defence present in the model, against 0.1% where a defence is modelled. A defence in the model means a structure is shown on the drawing. It says nothing about whether a particular home stays dry. The 1947 flood came over the top of the defences, which is the scenario the word "defended" never brings to mind.
The nearest tide gauge in the national record is at Portsmouth, where sea level rose by about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. That is the rate measured there over those years, small in any one year and steady across six decades.
Poplar's flood picture is poor, and it hurts most in the paperwork, because that is where insurers and lenders do their reading.