The London Beer Flood of 1814

On the seventeenth of October 1814, the poor of the St Giles rookery in London were killed by beer. At the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road stood enormous wooden vats of maturing porter, some over twenty feet tall, bound with iron hoops and holding many thousands of gallons apiece. That afternoon one of the great iron hoops on a vat slipped, and an hour or so later the vessel burst.

The force of its rupture tore open other vessels nearby, and in moments something on the order of three hundred thousand gallons of beer surged out of the brewery in a single black wave. The liquid smashed through the back wall and poured into the narrow, crowded streets and cramped tenement basements of one of the most densely packed slums in the city, where whole families lived below ground level.

The wave was said to reach some fifteen feet high as it swept down the lanes. It flooded cellars where people sat at supper or held a wake, and it demolished at least one house. Eight people died, all of them women and children, some drowned in the flood, others crushed by debris or overwhelmed in the basements they could not escape. Among the dead was a girl serving at a nearby tavern and several mourners gathered around a coffin.

An inquest was held, the bodies laid out for public view, and the jury returned a verdict of death by casualty, accident and misfortune. No one was held to blame; the disaster was ruled an act of God, and the brewery paid nothing. It did, however, recover duty already paid on the lost beer, and in time the industry abandoned such vast wooden vats for good.

Provenance: the Horse Shoe Brewery, St Giles parish, London, 17 October 1814.