Stoke Newington's flood risk comes from the rain, and it is a real one. No river or sea flood zone touches the place. About four in ten postcodes still rate high on at least one flood measure. A third more rate medium. Nothing in the modelling stands between that water and the front door.
The Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones cover none of the area's postcodes: 0% sit in zone 3, the highest-probability band, and 0% in zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it. The agency's separate rivers-and-sea risk assessment lists only two postcodes with any risk at all, covering 120 properties, and rates 20 of them very low and none higher. The flood-zone line in a sale brochure is about rivers and the sea, and neither is the problem here.
Surface water is. When the rivers score nothing and the postcodes still rate high, the danger is rain that lands on roofs and roads faster than the drains take it away. The reservoirs, the filter beds and the New River give a nearby conservation area its name. The rain is what colours in the flood map.
The Environment Agency's climate-adjusted flood zone, its forward look at river and sea flooding, also covers 0% of Stoke Newington's postcodes. On rivers and the sea, the future map looks like the current one.
For insurance, the river-and-sea picture helps and the surface-water ratings do not. An insurer pricing a flat here will look at the exact address, and a high surface-water rating can push a premium up or narrow the list of companies willing to quote. Put the exact address into the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk checker and look at the surface-water result specifically, then get an insurance quote while the sale can still be renegotiated.
Across Stoke Newington's postcodes, about 40% rate high, about 34% medium and about 58% low on at least one of several flood measures, with surface water counted alongside rivers and the sea. One measure is enough to tip a postcode into a band, so the shares overlap and a single postcode can show up in more than one.
On defences, the Environment Agency's modelled flood extents put 0% of the area's postcodes in the high-risk river-and-sea extent, whether undefended or defended. Nothing is defended because, in the model, the rivers and the sea have nothing to reach. No flood wall has ever stopped rain falling on a street.
The nearest tide gauge with a long record is at Portsmouth, where the sea rose by about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. That this is the nearest one shows how far the sea is from Stoke Newington's flood risk.
No historic flooding is recorded across the area, 0% of it. That is reassuring as far as it goes, though a record only holds the floods somebody mapped, and surface water tends to come and go without much paperwork.
On flooding, Stoke Newington scores poorly. The rivers and the sea leave it alone, but the rain does not.