Yes, and the risk sits down in the valley rather than spread evenly across the town. Roughly one postcode in eight falls in the highest river and sea flood zone. Hundreds of properties carry a rated risk. A dozen floods sit on the official record. Anyone buying here without pulling the flood report is buying the half of the town they can see from the road.
The Environment Agency splits river and sea risk into zones, and the two are separate bands rather than one inside the other. About 12% of the area's postcodes sit in flood zone 3, the highest probability band. Another 3% sit in flood zone 2, the medium probability fringe lying beyond zone 3 rather than containing it, which is why the smaller number is not the milder story. Together those are the low ground, running down the valley toward Par Harbour.
Surface water is the risk people skip because it arrives without a river attached. About 6% of postcodes fall inside recorded historic flood extents, and 12 flood events sit on the record, the most recent in November 2010. The geography explains it. The valley below the town was a tidal estuary until tin working upriver silted it into marsh, and Joseph Treffry drove the Par Canal through the result between 1829 and 1835. Ground that was engineered out of water behaves like ground that was engineered out of water.
Apply the Environment Agency's climate allowance and the zone widens. Around 16% of postcodes fall inside the flood zone under the climate-adjusted mapping, against about 12% in zone 3 today. That is the version of the map a twenty-five year mortgage will still be alive to meet.
For insurance, none of this is fatal and all of it is priceable. Get an indicative quote on the specific address before instructing a solicitor rather than after, because the premium and the excess are facts you want in front of you while the price is still a conversation, not once you are committed and discovering them politely by post.
Fold surface water in alongside rivers and sea and the picture broadens. On at least one flood indicator, about 19% of postcodes rate high, about 24% rate medium and about 32% rate low. Those bands overlap the flood zone figures rather than adding to them, so nobody should be stacking the percentages into a scarier total than the mapping supports.
Counts of homes land harder than shares of postcodes. Across the postcodes carrying some rated risk, and only those appear in the mapping at all, the Environment Agency's rivers and sea data covers 901 properties: 148 at high risk, 365 at medium, 34 at low and 48 at very low. Of the high risk properties, 71 are residential. That is a specific number of front doors.
Whether anything stands between those doors and the water is a separate question, and the modelling answers it plainly. About 11% of postcodes sit inside the modelled high risk extent with no defence present in the model, against about 3% where a defence is present. A defence in the model is not a promise about a house. It means something exists, is represented in the model, and is assumed to work.
The sea is near without being underfoot for most of the town. About 12% of postcodes sit within 500 metres of the coast, which is a threshold the data defines rather than a claim about any one address, and the closest point of the area comes within roughly 180 metres of the water. The median distance is about 1,100 metres.
Every postcode here falls under a shoreline management plan, and the stated policy is worth reading before the estate agent's description. Over the next twenty years the prevailing policy for this stretch is managed realignment, which means letting the shoreline move in a controlled way rather than holding it where it is. Over fifty and one hundred years it becomes no active intervention. A policy is a statement of intent about maintaining defences, not a defence itself, and not a guarantee that anyone will fund it.
The nearest long tide gauge, at Devonport, recorded a rise of about 2.35 millimetres a year across its 1962 to 2015 record. That is measured history rather than a projection, and it is the baseline everything else gets added to.
Flooding is the weakest part of the case for St Blazey, and the only part that should move what somebody offers. The risk is concentrated rather than general, which makes the flood search less of a formality here and more the thing that decides which houses stay on the list.