Yes, in patches. Wells was built where water comes out of a hill. Streams disappear into the Mendip caves and resurface in the Bishop's Palace garden, where they fill a moat before heading off down a brook. About a tenth of postcodes carry a high rating on one flood measure or another, and closer to three in ten sit at medium. This is not a city that has ever pretended to be dry.
On the Environment Agency's river-and-sea flood zones, about 9% of the area's postcodes fall in zone 3, the highest-probability band, and about 15% in zone 2, which is the medium-probability fringe lying beyond zone 3 rather than a ring drawn around it. Zone 2 being the larger figure is not a contradiction: the two bands are exclusive, and a specific address sits in one or neither.
Surface water is the risk that catches people out here, and it is also the one the mapping handles least tidily, because there is no separate surface-water-only share published for Wells. It arrives folded in with rivers and sea in the postcode ratings further down. What the geography tells you is that the River Sheppey is not the whole story. Water sinks into Thrupe Lane Swallet and Viaduct Sink, travels through the hill, and comes back up at Saint Andrew's Well before filling the moat and running into Keward Brook. Ground that receives its water from the top of a hill by way of a cave system does not always behave the way contour lines suggest it should.
Under the Environment Agency's climate-change allowance, the zone share rises to about 44% of the area. That is the forward-looking version of the same map, and it is the number that matters over a mortgage term rather than a fixed rate.
For insurance, the practical position is that Wells is a place to get the quote before you get attached. Cover is generally obtainable, but where an address sits in a high band the premium and the excess can be set well above what the current owner is paying, and their renewal figure tells you nothing about yours.
Across the area as a whole, about 10% of postcodes rate high on at least one flood measure, about 29% medium and about 37% low. Those bands fold surface water in alongside rivers and sea, so they overlap the zone shares above and cannot be added to them.
Counted as homes rather than postcodes, the Environment Agency's rivers-and-sea mapping lists 2,204 properties across the 112 postcodes that carry any risk at all. Of those, 54 sit in the high band, 556 medium and 198 low, and 51 of the 54 high are residential. Postcodes with no modelled risk never appear in that list, so this describes the exposed part of Wells rather than the city.
On whether anything actually stands between the water and the house, the answer is uncomfortable. Of the 437 postcodes inside the modelled extents, about 18% fall within a high-risk extent with no defence present in the model, and the same share, about 18%, fall within a high-risk defended extent. Around 41% sit in a low-risk undefended extent. Defended means the model knows a structure is there. It does not mean the structure is adequate, maintained, or sized for the climate-adjusted map, and it is not a reason to skip a proper survey. Around 10% of postcodes also fall inside the Axe Brue Internal Drainage Board area, which manages watercourses rather than guaranteeing outcomes.
Sea level barely belongs in an answer about a city on the edge of the Mendips, and the record makes the point for itself: the nearest tide gauge on file is Portsmouth, which is not even on the same coast, where the measured trend across the 1962 to 2023 record runs at about 2 millimetres a year. That is a historic measured rate rather than a forecast, and for Wells it is background.
No recorded historic flooding shows up for the area at all, which is worth something real. It is not the same as proof that nothing has ever flooded. Records are patchy, small events go unlogged, and a spring-fed city has had a long time to have a bad winter that nobody wrote down. Read it as the absence of a known event rather than a clean bill of health.
Flood risk in Wells is middling and stubbornly address-specific: a genuine minority of homes carry high river-and-sea risk, most carry none, and the climate-adjusted map is where the argument moves next. Check the postcode, not the city.