The London Beer Flood of 1814

Send us a text

Nobody expects to drown in beer. Yet on October 17, 1814, that's exactly what happened to eight Londoners when a massive vat at Horseshoe Brewery catastrophically failed, unleashing a 15-foot tsunami of porter beer through the impoverished streets of St Giles.

The disaster began with something seemingly insignificant—a fallen iron hoop on a towering 22-foot wooden vat containing over 300,000 gallons of fermenting porter. Brewery clerk George Creek, with 17 years of experience, dismissed it as routine. An hour later, the weakened vat exploded with such force that it breached the brewery walls, sending bricks flying over nearby homes and unleashing a deadly wave of beer into the surrounding neighborhood.

What makes this tragedy particularly heartbreaking is who paid the ultimate price. A 14-year-old barmaid crushed by collapsing walls. A four-year-old girl swept away during tea time. Five women, including a mother who had just lost her toddler the previous day, drowned while preparing for a wake. The flood demolished tenements, displaced families, and devastated a community already struggling with extreme poverty. Yet when investigators ruled the incident "an act of God," the brewery escaped all liability—recouping their losses through tax refunds while victims' families received nothing.

The London Beer Flood represents more than just a bizarre historical footnote. It illuminates how industrial accidents disproportionately impact vulnerable populations, how corporate consequences rarely match the human cost, and how technological progress often follows in disaster's wake. The transition from dangerous wooden vats to modern stainless steel fermenters began here, written in beer and blood.

Curious about other overlooked disasters that shaped our world? Subscribe to History's A Disaster for more stories that reveal how catastrophe and progress intertwine throughout human history. Share with friends who appreciate learning the surprising, tragic, and sometimes darkly ironic moments that changed everything.

Facebook: historyisadisaster
Instagram: historysadisaster
email: [e-mail]

Special thank you to Lunarfall Audio for producing and doing all the heavy lifting on audio editing since April 13, 2025, the Murder of Christopher Meyer episode https://lunarfallaudio.com/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
According to the band Psycho Stick, beer is good and
stuff, but do you know when beeris not good?
When it's flowing down yourstreet in a giant tidal wave,
destroying houses and knockingdown buildings and, well,
drowning your neighbors.
And that's exactly whathappened on October 17th 1814,

(00:26):
in the London neighborhood of StGiles's Rookery.
So what happened?
I'm Andrew and this isHistory's A Disaster.
And tonight we are diving intoand taking a swim through the
London Beer Flood, which startedat the Horseshoe Brewery on the

(00:50):
corner of Great Russell Streetand Tottenham Court, london, a
very poor and densely populatedslum with dirt, cheap housing
and shitty tenement buildings,and it would eventually become

(01:11):
London's fourth largest brewery.
And back then, one of thebiggest attractions to the
London breweries was the largestorage vats of Porter.
Now, if you're like me, youhave no clue what a porter is.
I'm, admittedly not much of adrinker, so the different types

(01:31):
of beer are a bit of a mysteryto me, but a porter is a dark
English ale that was started inthe 1700s and was popular with
dock workers, hence the nameporter.
The beer is made from brownmalt and hops porter and
requires months of aging beforeit's ready, hence the need for

(01:53):
large vats.
And speaking of these largevats, I'd totally Scrooge McDuck
the hell out of one.
How often are you going to getthe chance to swim in a big ass
barrel of beer?
You know?
Doing the backstroke in someBudweiser, maybe doing the
breaststroke in the bush andthat was not an innuendo, by the

(02:14):
way.
Get your mind out of the gutter, you dirty perv.
I in no way just wanted to saystroke and bush in the same
sentence.
And let's be real here, my asssinks, and admittedly not that
great of a swimmer, so it'd bemore like the doggy paddle in

(02:38):
some Milwaukee's Best Basic assswimming style in the shittiest
beer ever made.
But anyways, forget all that.
These large vats were somethingof a tourist attraction for the
brewery.
The bigger the vat, the betterthe attraction, because

(02:59):
obviously bigger is alwaysbetter.
Bigger is always better.
In 1764, the biggest vats heldroughly 1,500 barrels worth of
beer in each one.
And these vats would go on toget bigger and bigger and of
course eventually bigger becomesmore likely to fail, showing

(03:19):
that bigger sometimes is notalways better.
And that's exactly whathappened in 1814.
On the afternoon of Monday,october 17th 1814, around 4.30
pm, storehouse clerk GeorgeCreek inspected one of the

(03:41):
22-foot-tall wooden vats,reinforced with heavy iron loops
, in which this black beerfermented.
As he looked around he noticedthat a 700-pound loop had fallen
off an enormous cask thatstored a 10-month-old batch of
porter.
Now, george had been around fora while.

(04:02):
He'd been with the brewery for17 long years and knew that this
happened a few times a year.
So no big deal.
These 22 foot tall vats werefilled almost to the top with
beer.
Only the last four inches ofthe top were not filled.
The beer was still fermentingand the pressure from the
fermentation process would causethe barrel to expand.

(04:26):
So a broken loop, no big deal.
He'd leave a note for his bossabout it and his boss would just
shrug it off and leave anothernote for a maintenance guy to
get around to fixing the loop.
Problem solved nothing to worryabout.
Nothing bad could possibly comefrom a silly ass broken loop.

(04:46):
About an hour after theinspection, a large explosion
rocked the storeroom.
The vat with the fucked up ringblew itself up, sending over
300,000 gallons the equivalentof over 1 million pints of beer
spilling out.
The blast smashed the valve offits neighbor.

(05:09):
That had another 1,000 barrelsworth of beer in it.
In total, there was now nearly600 tons of beer smashing
through the storehouse, breakingopen more vats and barrels and
adding to the growing flood.
The force of the explosion wasbad enough to break open the
rear wall of the storehouse,sending bricks flying over the

(05:32):
tops of homes on nearby GreatRussell Street.
The brick walls surrounding thebrewery collapsed, claiming the
flood's first victim.
Eleanor Cooper, a 14-year-oldbarmaid working at Tavistock
Arms on the backside of thebrewery, was outside cleaning
pots at the water pump that satin the shadow of this 20-foot

(05:55):
tall wall.
When it collapsed outwards, itburied her in the rubble.
The wave of beer, now 15 feettall, smashed through the wall
and onto New Street and sincethere was no type of drainage in
the streets and St Giles wasbuilt on flat, low-lying ground,
the beer had nowhere to goexcept into the streets and

(06:18):
neighboring homes and businesses.
Anything in its path wassmashed and swept down the
street.
Lower levels of homes wereflooded, others were smashed
completely, while a few weremoved off of their foundations.
The shitty shacks around thebrewery were crushed under the

(06:41):
weight of the flood.
The flood would fill thecellars and first floors of the
tenement buildings, causing manyresidents to jump on tables and
chairs to escape the rapidlyspreading beer.
New Street, where the floodstarted, would suffer the worst.
When the flood rushed through,mary Banfield was sitting and

(07:02):
enjoying tea time with herfour-year-old daughter, hannah,
and one of her little friends.
All three of them would beswept away in the deluge.
Mary and the other little girlwould spend time in the hospital
before recovering.
Hannah would not be so luckyand drowned in the flood.
The beer would end up smashingdown her tenement building.

(07:23):
In the basement of the buildingwas Anne Saville and four
others Mary Mulvey and herthree-year-old son, thomas
Murray, elizabeth Smith andKatherine Butler.
Anne's two-year-old son hadjust died the day before.
Her friends were over to helpher in her grief and to prepare
to hold a wake for her son.

(07:44):
They were just waiting fortheir husbands and sons to get
home from work when the floodsmashed the building down.
All five women would die in therubble.
Later on, in another tenement,another child, sarah Bates,
would also be found dead.
No one in the brewery waskilled, although three workers

(08:05):
would have to be rescued fromthe collapsed brewery.
The St Giles neighborhood, oncedrowning in poverty, was now
drowning in porter.
Everything was covered in beeras the 15-foot wave of beer
rushed through the slum.
It would be months before thesmell of beer would start to
fade away.
Now, once the flood finallystarted to recede, rescue

(08:29):
workers drenched head to toe inthe warm liquor, waded through
waist-deep alcohol, pickingthrough wood and bricks, trying
desperately to rescue anyonetrapped in the rubble.
Wood and bricks tryingdesperately to rescue anyone
trapped in the rubble.
Some of the workers would tryto comfort the panicked
neighbors and loved ones ofthose still missing in the flood

(08:49):
.
They needed them quiet so theycould hear the soft moans and
cries of those trapped in therubble.
Now there's rumors and mythsthat people were gathered in the
streets and collecting beer andjust partying it up were
gathered in the streets andcollecting beer and just
partying it up, along with therebeing a potential ninth victim
who died days later of alcoholpoisoning.
Since none of this was everreported by newspapers at the

(09:10):
time, this is most likely nottrue and just urban myths that
sprang up in the years followingthe tragedy.
The newspapers actively did notlike the Irish and were no
friends to the immigrants thatmade up the St Giles
neighborhood, so if some shitlike this had actually happened,
they would have definitelyreported on it.

(09:31):
Instead, they were ratherrespectful in their reporting
and mentioned how awful thescene was and compared it to the
devastation left behind by afire or earthquake.
After the flood, watchmen atthe brewery would charge

(09:51):
visitors to view the destroyedvats and they would have plenty
of business.
Hundreds came out to view thescene.
I mean, come on, who wouldn'twant to check it out?
Much like a car or train wreck.
Today, everyone wants to take apeek at shit that got fucked up
.
A coroner's inquest would beheld on the 19th at a workhouse

(10:14):
in the St Giles Parish.
The coroner, george Hodgson,oversaw the entire thing.
After reading out the names andages of the victims, he took
the jurors to the site of theflood.
They toured the ruined breweryand viewed the dead before
hearing testimony from witnesses.
The first witness was good oldGeorge Creek, who saw the whole

(10:38):
thing and had a brother who wasinjured in the collapse of the
brewery wall.
He would explain to the jurorshow these iron loops fail a
couple times a year and isnormally not a problem.
Richard Hauser, the owner ofthe Tavistock Arms, and several
others came forward to offertheir testimony.

(10:58):
Also, the jury would return averdict that the eight victims
had died casually, accidentallyand by misfortune.
And seriously, what the fuck?
Obviously never drowned beforein a flood, but I'm pretty sure
there's nothing fucking casualabout it.
Along with this asinine verdict.

(11:19):
They would rule the flood as anact of God, so no one was at
fault.
The flood would end up costingthe owners of the brewery the
equivalent of 1.5 million intoday's currency in damages, but
they were able to reclaim paidexcise tax, so they would pretty

(11:40):
much break even and would stayin operation for another hundred
years After it closed in 1921,the Dominion Theater now stands
in its place, which you knowwhat.
That's just great for thebrewery.
They didn't lose much in theaccident.
However, the residents of theneighborhood were not so

(12:00):
fortunate.
They received nothing and werejust shit out of luck.
Since it was an act of God anddefinitely was no fault of the
brewery at all, they would nothave to pay any type of
compensation to the victim'sfamilies.
During the funeral for theeight victims of the flood,
thousands would come out to paytheir respects and leave pennies

(12:22):
and shillings for the poorfamilies to pay for the funerals
.
Eventually, they would start tophase out these wooden vats and
replace them with concretevessels.
The square concrete vesselswould be lined with resin, slate
, enamel or asphalt, which youknow what.
That's exactly what I want inmy beer.

(12:42):
Just a touch of asphaltstraight from the roadway, and
would that make the saying onefor the road, one from the road,
and I don't know what's worse.
This or around the start of the1900s, they started using mild
steel to ferment beer.
The acid in the beer wouldcause the steel to rust and the

(13:04):
rust would give the beer anoticeable metallic taste.
So what do you prefer in yourbeer, asphalt or rust?
Either way, I think I'll pass.
Eventually, they would go on tosettle on stainless steel as
the preferred material forindustrial fermentation that is
used today.
And that was the London BeerFlood, one of the more unique

(13:32):
disasters to take place inLondon.
If you like the show, pleaseconsider leaving a rating or
review on your app of choice,and you can always reach the
show at historiesand, whether itbe Facebook, instagram or

(13:55):
whatever other ones.
I'm on TikTok and Blue Sky andI'm on a bunch of them, except X
, because well, fuck X.
And don't forget share theepisode, because sharing is
caring, and if there was morecaring in the world, maybe
history wouldn't be a disaster.
Thanks and goodbye.