Yes, in exactly the places you would most want to live. The town climbs a steep bank above a tidal estuary, so the risk sits low down and so does the view. Almost every postcode is a short walk from salt water. The last recorded flood here came off the sea rather than a river. Height is the whole story in this town, and it is measured in metres, not miles.
The Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones put about 9% of the area's postcodes in zone 3, the highest-probability band, and about 4% in zone 2, the medium-probability fringe that lies beyond zone 3 rather than wrapping around it. Zone 2 being the smaller figure is not a misprint. They are separate bands, not nested rings, and reading them as a total is the most common mistake made with this map.
Surface water is not published here as a share of its own. It is folded into the combined postcode indicator further down, alongside rivers and sea. That distinction matters in a town built on the steep west side of the estuary, where the water that ruins a Tuesday is often the water arriving downhill at speed rather than the water arriving up the channel.
With the climate allowance applied, the share of postcodes inside the mapped zones rises to about 11%. That allowance is built into the Environment Agency's mapping as a forward look, not offered as a forecast of any particular winter.
Risk of this kind shows up in insurance long before it shows up in a survey. The quote will be driven by the individual address rather than the town, the underwriter will want to know about the ground floor, and the sensible order is to get an indicative quote before instructing a solicitor rather than after.
On at least one flood measure, which folds surface water in with rivers and sea, about 15% of the area's postcodes rate high, about 7% medium and about 15% low. Those bands overlap the zone shares above rather than adding to them. A single postcode can sit in both counts, and adding the two sets together produces a number that describes nowhere.
Counted as properties rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping records 214 properties at high risk, 39 at medium and 37 at low, out of 535 across the postcodes that carry any risk at all. Of the high-risk properties, 72 are residential. Only postcodes already carrying some risk appear in that list, so it describes the exposed edge of the town rather than the town.
About 9% of postcodes fall inside a modelled high-risk extent where a defence is present in the model, and about 9% inside a high-risk extent with no defence modelled at all. Present in the model means a structure exists on the map. It does not mean the house behind it stays dry. Three flood events are on record here, the most recent in October 2004, caused by the sea overtopping defences, which is precisely what defended looks like on a bad night.
About 85% of postcodes sit within 500 metres of the coast, which is a threshold the data defines rather than a statement about any one house. The median distance to the water is about 196 metres, and the closest postcode sits about 13 metres from it.
Every postcode falls under a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy across the 20, 50 and 100 year horizons is hold the line. That is an intention to keep maintaining defences over those periods. It is not a defence, not a funded budget, and not a commitment to any individual property.
The nearest long-running tide gauge sits at Devonport, with a record from 1962 to 2015, across which sea level rose at about 2.35 millimetres a year. That is a measured historic rate over that record rather than a projection.
Flood risk here lands somewhere in the middle, in the way coastal towns usually do: untroubled on the hill, a live question at the bottom, and wholly dependent on which of the two you are buying. The postcode will tell you almost nothing. The contour line will tell you everything.