Yes. Flood risk is the biggest drawback of living in Stonehouse. The river flood zones cover only a sliver of the town. On the wider measures, nearly a third of postcodes are rated high risk for at least one kind of flooding. The rivers have flooded the town before, most recently in 2007. Most of the risk here is water the official zone maps never show.
In the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 4% of Stonehouse's postcodes fall in Flood Zone 3, the highest-probability band, and none fall in Flood Zone 2, the medium-probability fringe beyond it. The agency has 11 recorded flood events on file for the area, the most recent in July 2007, when the main river overtopped its channel and there were no raised defences to hold it back. A listing that says "not in a flood zone" will be accurate for most homes here and will still leave out most of the risk.
The Environment Agency's surface-water mapping is the part that matters most in Stonehouse. Rain that falls on the slopes of the Cotswold edge has to go somewhere, and on the flatter ground towards the canal it collects in streets the river maps leave alone. The Lower Severn Internal Drainage Board covers about 4% of postcodes, the low land where keeping the ground drained is someone's actual job.
The climate-adjusted zone, the agency's view of how far the river and sea zones could reach under future conditions, covers about 4% of the area. For river flooding, at least, the long-range picture barely moves from today's.
Insurance follows the risk your exact property carries, so two houses a street apart can get very different quotes. Before you commit to a house, look it up on the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service and check the surface-water result as well as the rivers. In Stonehouse the surface-water result is usually the one that changes the answer.
The agency also rates every postcode on several separate flood measures, surface water among them. Taking the worst result for each, about 31% of Stonehouse postcodes are high risk on at least one measure, about 33% medium and about 52% low. A postcode can count in more than one of those groups, so they overlap rather than adding up. Each figure is a share of postcodes, not of houses.
The agency's rivers-and-sea mapping counts actual properties, though only in the 14 postcodes it lists as carrying some risk, which between them hold 343 properties. Of those, 46 are at high risk, 11 at medium, two at low and 12 at very low, and 27 of the high-risk properties are homes. The postcode shares tell you how widely the risk is spread across the town; these counts tell you how many front doors the river can actually reach.
In the agency's modelled flood extents, about 2% of postcodes sit in high-risk areas with no defence and about 3% in high-risk areas with a defence. "Defended" only means the model includes a defence there. It says nothing about whether that defence will hold in any given flood, and the 2007 flood happened where the channel had no raised banks.
The town is about 4.4 kilometres from the coast at its nearest point, and the shoreline management plan for that stretch of the Severn says hold the line for the next 20, 50 and 100 years. That plan is a statement of what the authorities intend to do, and it depends on funding nobody has yet committed. It also tells you nothing about what defences are actually in place today.
The nearest tide gauge in the national records is at Portsmouth, which measured sea level rising by about 2 millimetres a year between 1962 and 2023. That is what one gauge on a different coast recorded over that period, and its relevance to the Severn is limited.
Flooding is where Stonehouse is weakest. Here the risk comes as much from rainfall as from the river, and the reassuring zone maps cover only part of it.