Teesside Flood Risk, Postcode by Postcode: Darlington 8%, Stockton 3.1%

Across the five Tees Valley boroughs, 682 postcodes out of about 19,200 sit inside an Environment Agency flood zone for rivers and the sea. That is 3.6%, well under the GB average of 8.8% across 363 councils. Teesside is, on this measure, a low-risk place to live.

The share is not spread evenly, though. Darlington is at 8.0%, nearly the GB figure, while Redcar and Cleveland, the borough with the coast, is the lowest at 1.6%. Stockton-on-Tees, where most people would guess the river is the problem, sits at 3.1%, almost twice Redcar’s share.

How much of Teesside is at high flood risk?

A small share, concentrated along the Tees and its tributaries. The table ranks the five boroughs by the share of their live postcodes whose centre falls inside Flood Zone 2 or 3 on the Environment Agency’s planning map, the medium and high probability areas for river and sea flooding.

Source: Environment Agency Flood Map for Planning, Flood Zones 2 and 3 (rivers and sea), with NRW and SEPA equivalents for Wales and Scotland, joined to ONS Postcode Directory live postcodes; built 22 July 2026. The GB figure is the simple mean across councils; weighted by postcode it is 8.2%.

For scale, the places that really do have a flood problem look nothing like this. Boston in Lincolnshire has 93.7% of its postcodes in a flood zone and Hull 92.6%. York, with the Ouse and the Foss, is at 11.1%. County Durham, next door, is at 1.6%, the same as Redcar and Cleveland.

So the honest headline is that Teesside is not a flood-prone region. What the numbers do say is where the risk is, and it is along the water, not spread across the boroughs.

Why is Darlington highest and Redcar lowest?

Because Teesside’s flood story is the river, not the sea. Darlington has the River Skerne running through the middle of the town and the Tees along its southern edge, and the low ground beside both is where its 255 flood-zone postcodes are.

Stockton’s zones trace the Tees through the borough: the low ground at Portrack, around the Tees Barrage and along Bowesfield, where the river loops before it reaches Thornaby. Middlesbrough’s are the riverside and the becks that drain into it. These are the planning map’s medium and high probability bands, and they follow the water line closely enough that a street two hundred metres from the river can be clear while the one beside it is not.

Redcar and Cleveland has the coast, and the coast is the thing people worry about, but the borough’s 66 flood-zone postcodes are mostly beside the Tees estuary and the becks inland, not along the promenade. The seafront towns sit on higher ground behind the beach. Hartlepool is the same story: a coastal borough with a low share.

How do I check my own postcode?

Use the GOV.UK service Check your long term flood risk, run by the Environment Agency. Type in a postcode and it gives the long-term chance of flooding for that area, separately for rivers and the sea and for surface water, with a band from very low to high.

Two things to know about the result. It describes an area, not your house, so a high band means the land around you is in the zone and says nothing about your floor level, your drains or your sandbags. And surface water, the rain that cannot get away fast enough, is a separate map from the river one, and it catches plenty of streets well away from any river. Across the North East, winter brings around 240 mm of rain and about 23 days a year of heavy rain, so the surface water result is worth reading as carefully as the river one.

For a planning-grade answer, the Environment Agency’s Flood Map for Planning shows the zones themselves. A surveyor or conveyancer will use that one.

What should you do if your postcode comes up medium or high?

Nothing dramatic, but a few things in order.

1. Read the council’s flood plan. Each borough council publishes what it does in a flood, where sandbags come from and who to call. Find it now, not when the river is up.
2. Sign up for flood warnings. The Environment Agency sends them by phone, text or email for rivers and the sea. It is free and takes five minutes.
3. Move the irreplaceable things up. Photo albums, documents, the external hard drive, the children’s school books. Upstairs, on a high shelf, or in a lidded box that can be picked up in one go.
4. Know where the stopcock and the fuse board are. If water comes in, both get turned off first.
5. Talk to your insurer. Ask what your home cover says about flooding and what it expects you to do before and after. That is a conversation for them, not for us.

If you are buying or moving in the Tees Valley, our moving house checklist covers the questions to ask about a property before you exchange.

Precautionary and emergency storage

Storage comes into this in two ways, and neither is about the day the water arrives.

The first is before a warning. If your postcode is in a zone and the house has a downstairs full of things you would hate to lose, moving the rarely used ones out for the wet quarter is cheap peace of mind. Out-of-season furniture, the second sofa, boxed books, the bikes, the Christmas decorations: anything that lives on a downstairs floor and does not need to.

The second is after a flood. A flooded house takes months to dry, and the drying works better with the rooms empty. Everything that stayed dry goes somewhere dry, and everything that got wet is dried first, because a sealed container will not do that job and damp spreads to whatever sits next to it. Our damp and sea air post has the drying and packing rules; they are the same ones.

On the unit itself: iBOXED’s containers are ground-level steel boxes on hard standing, and some sites also have first-floor internal units of 90 and 135 sq ft. Where a site offers them, an upstairs unit is the obvious choice for anyone whose worry is water. Ask the site what is on offer when you book.

Guide prices, checked 2 October 2026. Sizes and availability change from week to week, and not every size is offered at every site. For what's available today, with live prices, see the Stockton (Preston Farm), Ingleby Barwick and Redcar pages.

The minimum term is one month, so a wet-quarter rental or a post-flood one is a short arrangement, not a contract. Access is by personal PIN at the main gate, 24 hours a day, which matters when a warning arrives at nine in the evening. The container is secured with a high-security padlock, and you hold the key. Ask your own insurer whether belongings in storage are covered, and ask the site what cover applies.

Stockton has the highest flood-zone share on Teesside, and our Preston Farm site on Surtees Business Park is inside the borough, just off the A19 and A66. All three iBOXED sites are pinned on the map below.