Silver End's flood risk is higher than its river maps suggest. Hardly any of the area is in a river flood zone. About one postcode in six rates high on at least one flood measure once surface water is counted. The sea is miles away. Most of the risk here is rainwater with nowhere to drain.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 1% of the Silver End area's postcodes are in Flood Zone 3, the high-probability band, and none are in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability band that surrounds it. The two zones don't overlap, so a postcode is counted in one or the other. The agency has two floods on record here, the latest in February 1947, when a main river carried more water than its channel could hold. That was the last time a river made the record.
Surface water is a separate measure. It comes from heavy rain on ground and drains that cannot take it fast enough, and it can happen on a street nowhere near a river. The river-and-sea zones leave it out, so the broader postcode figures below run much higher than the zone shares above. A village known for its flat roofs has always known about water that won't drain away.
With the Environment Agency's climate change allowance added, about 1% of the area's postcodes are in the high-probability zone, so on the agency's modelling the river outlook for later this century barely moves.
For insurance, the two kinds of risk get different treatment. A home outside the river zones with nothing on record usually gets ordinary cover. One flagged for surface water, or one of the few in a river flood zone, may face more questions from insurers, a higher excess or a smaller choice of providers. Put the exact postcode into the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service and read the surface water result first, because that is the risk this village actually has.
On this site's combined postcode measures, which count a postcode once it reaches a level on any one of several indicators, surface water included, about 17% of the area's postcodes rate high on at least one, 15% medium and 35% low. Those shares cover different ground from the river zones and shouldn't be added to them.
Counting homes is more useful than counting postcodes. The Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists only the 11 postcodes in the Silver End area that carry some river or sea risk, and they hold 255 properties. Of those, 34 are at high risk, 22 of them homes, 11 at medium risk and 18 at low risk. Every other postcode has no river or sea risk at all on the agency's mapping.
As for defences, the agency's high-risk river extent covers about 1% of postcodes whether defences are left out of the model or included. In this mapping, "defended" means only that the model contains a defence. It doesn't mean the house behind it stays dry, and here the defences make no difference to the share of postcodes inside the extent.
Shoreline management plans cover about 13% of the area's postcodes, even though the nearest coast is about 7 kilometres away. For those postcodes the policy is to hold the line at 20, 50 and 100 years. That is a stated plan for each period, and it depends on funding nobody has yet committed. A plan for the century tells you nothing about which defences exist on the coast today.
On flooding, Silver End is below average: the rivers are a small problem, but surface water affects enough postcodes that the exact address you buy matters.