Regency Events: The London Beer Flood of 1814

Meux Brewery

In looking into breweries in London, I ran into the story of the Great London Beer Flood of 1814….and thought this was a great opportunity to start a new blog category: Regency Events!

On October 17, 1814 in St. Giles at around 5:30 PM, a huge vat containing over 135,000 imperial gallons of beer (roughly 1.3 million pints) ruptured at the Meux and Company Brewery. A wave of beer gushed into the streets, destroying two homes, causing a wall of the Tavistock Arms pub to crumble and crush to death teenage employee Eleanor Cooper. Within minutes, George and New streets were flooded, taking the lives of a mother and daughter and swamping a room where a wake was being held.

Located in Tottenham Court Road, the Meux brewery was among the tenements and poor houses of the St. Giles Rookery. With no drainage in the streets and no where for the beer to go, basement rooms flooded, and “residents scaled tables and furniture to save themselves from drowning” in porter (http://www.history.com/news/the-london-beer-flood-200-years-ago).

In total, eight people died and many more were injured. However, had the vat burst an hour or so later, more residents would have been home from work and resulted in a much higher number of deaths.

It took weeks for the smell of beer to completely fade, and Meux and Company was eventually taken to court. Ultimately, the “Great Beer Flood of London” was ruled to be an “Act of God” by judge and jury.

The only known eyewitness was an anonymous American “who had been unlucky in taking a short cut down New Street, behind the brewery, when the vat burst” (Strange Tales of Ale, Martyn Cornell, 2015). His story was published twenty years later in the New York magazine, The Knickerbocker:
All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath. A roar as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils. I was rescued with great difficulty by the people who immediately collected around me, and from whom I learned the nature of the disaster which had befallen me. An immense vat belonging to a brew house situated in Banbury street [sic – more properly Bainbridge Street], Saint Giles, and containing four or five thousand barrels of strong beer, had suddenly burst and swept every thing before it. Whole dwellings were literally riddled by the flood; numbers were killed; and from among the crowds which filled the narrow passages in every direction came the groans of sufferers. Though but just rescued, as it were, from the jaws of Death, my clothes heavy with the hot malt liquor which had saturated them, I can truly say that fifteen minutes had not elapsed before I had entirely forgotten the late disastrous occurrence, in the emotions excited by perusing in the Admiralty Bulletin an exaggerated account of a most brilliant victory gained over the American army before Baltimore, in which it was stated that twelve thousand Americans had been completely put to route by about four thousand British troops, including a brigade of seamen.*

The Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1814