Yes, and the town has never been in a position to pretend otherwise. About one postcode in seven sits in the highest river and sea flood zone. More than half of them are within five hundred metres of the coast. Around 240 homes carry a high risk rating. The risk here is real, concentrated and mapped street by street, which makes the town-level answer close to useless and the address-level answer close to definitive.
The Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones place 14% of the town's postcodes in zone 3, the highest-probability band, and a further 5% in zone 2. Zone 2 being the smaller number is not a mistake. It is the medium-probability fringe sitting outside zone 3, not a larger circle containing it, so the two are read side by side rather than stacked.
Surface water is the quieter half of the problem and the half nobody photographs. The Tame, the stream that once divided East and West Teignmouth, now runs beneath the town in culverts, showing itself higher up as Brimley Brook and joined by the Winterbourne, which only flows in winter or after heavy rain. A watercourse in a pipe under a town behaves perfectly until the afternoon it stops behaving. Surface water is not published as its own share here; it is folded into the combined postcode indicators below.
Run with the climate change allowance applied, the modelled zone widens to 24% of postcodes. That is the same mapping against future sea level and rainfall assumptions rather than present ones, and it is the version a thirty-year mortgage is quietly signing up to.
For insurance, this is the difference between a formality and a conversation. Cover for a property inside the mapped zones can come with a higher premium, a separate and much larger excess on flood specifically, or flood treated as its own question rather than part of the bundle. An indicative quote for the exact address, obtained before a solicitor is instructed, is the cheapest piece of due diligence available on a house here.
On the combined postcode indicators, which rate each postcode on at least one measure and include surface water alongside rivers and sea, 12% come out high, 8% medium and 19% low. Those bands overlap with the flood zone shares rather than adding to them, so the two sets of numbers are describing the same water from different angles.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists 1,750 properties across the 84 postcodes carrying any risk at all. Of those, 238 are rated high, 224 medium, 394 low and 448 very low, with 138 of the high-rated ones residential. Postcodes with no risk never appear on that list, so this counts the exposed part of the town rather than the town.
Around 14% of postcodes fall inside a high-probability modelled extent with no defence present in the model, against 4% where a defence is present. Present in the model means a structure exists there, not that the house behind it stays dry. Defences are built to a design standard and the sea arrives at whatever height it chooses, which is why the most recent recorded flood here, in February 2014, is logged as overtopping of defences. The Environment Agency holds 89 recorded flood events for the town.
The water is close by any measure. Some 56% of postcodes sit within 500 metres of the coast, a threshold the mapping sets rather than a verdict on any single address, the median distance is about 410 metres, and the nearest postcode sits 4 metres from it.
Every postcode is covered by a shoreline management plan, and the policy at the twenty, fifty and hundred-year horizons is hold the line. That is a stated intention to maintain the defended line, written down and reviewed. It is not a wall, not a funded programme, and not a guarantee. At the nearest tide gauge, at Devonport, sea level was measured rising at 2.35 millimetres a year across the 1962 to 2015 record, which is a historic rate over that period rather than a projection.
Flooding is the weakest part of the case for living in Teignmouth, and the weakness is specific rather than general. The town is worth buying into. Certain streets in it need checking on the mapping first, and that check costs nothing but the ninety seconds it takes to type in a postcode.