For most of the town, no. About one postcode in a hundred sits in the highest river and sea flood zone. Nine in a hundred carry a high flag on at least one flood measure. Only one flood event appears on the record at all. The risk here is narrow and very specific rather than general, which means the address matters far more than the town does.
The Environment Agency's river and sea mapping puts about 1% of the area's postcodes in flood zone 3, the highest-probability band, and about 2% in flood zone 2, which is the additional medium-probability fringe sitting outside zone 3 rather than wrapped around it. The recorded history is thin: one event, in November 2010, when a main river went beyond what its channel could carry and there were no raised defences to slow it down.
Surface water is the risk those zone maps do not attempt to cover. Rain that arrives faster than drains and culverts can move it does not care which band a property sits in, and in a town built across valleys running down to the coast it is the mechanism most likely to put water where nobody planned for it.
Looking forward, the Environment Agency's climate change allowance widens the mapped zones to about 6% of postcodes. That is a modelled allowance for a wetter future rather than a statement about today, and it is the figure worth knowing if you intend to still own the house in thirty years.
For insurance, none of this is fatal, but it is not nothing either. An address inside a mapped zone or carrying a high surface-water flag can change what an insurer quotes, what excess they attach, and occasionally whether they quote at all. Get an indicative quote on the specific address before you instruct a solicitor, not after the survey comes back.
Across the town as a whole, about 9% of postcodes rate high on at least one flood measure, about 12% medium and about 40% low. That indicator folds surface water in alongside rivers and the sea, so it overlaps with the zone shares rather than adding to them. Two different measures of the same town, counting different things, which is why a single headline number for flood risk is close to meaningless.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the picture sharpens. Within the postcodes that carry any river or sea risk at all, 822 properties are mapped, of which 94 sit at high risk, 73 at medium and 155 at low. Of the high-risk ones, 82 are residential. Postcodes with no risk do not appear in that list at all, so this is the affected slice of the town rather than the town.
On whether anything stands between the water and the house, about 1% of postcodes sit inside the modelled high-risk extent with a defence present in the model, and about 1% sit inside it with nothing. A defence appearing in a model means a structure has been counted, not that a house behind it is safe, and treating the word "defended" as reassurance is exactly the mistake the modelling does not invite you to make.
The coast is close for a small number of addresses and distant for most. The nearest postcode sits about 140 metres from the sea, about 2% of postcodes fall within the 500 metre threshold the coastal data uses, and the median postcode is about 2,150 metres inland.
The shoreline management plan covers every postcode here, and its stated policy for this stretch is no active intervention across the twenty, fifty and hundred year horizons. In plain terms, the published intention is not to maintain or build defences on this frontage. A policy is an intention rather than a promise, and no active intervention is the intention that costs the least to keep.
At the nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, the measured record between 1962 and 2015 shows sea level rising by about 2.35 millimetres a year. That is a historic rate from an instrument, not a projection.
Flood risk here lands in the middle of the range, and it is one of the few things about the town where the general answer is genuinely useless. Nine postcodes in a hundred carry a high flag and the rest do not, so the only version of this question worth asking is about one address.