On October 17, 1814, a wooden fermentation vat at the Meux and Company Brewery on Tottenham Court Road in London began to fail.
The vat contained approximately 135,000 gallons of fermenting porter, a dark heavy beer. When one of its iron hoops broke the stress on the structure became too great.
The vat burst. And then the other vats around it burst in a chain reaction.
More than 300,000 gallons of beer poured out of the brewery and into the streets of St. Giles, one of the poorest neighborhoods in London.
What the Flood Did
The wave of beer was powerful enough to knock down the walls of several houses and flood basements and ground floor rooms across the neighborhood.
Eight people died. Five of them were attending a wake for a two year old child in a basement room when the beer wave collapsed the walls and flooded the space before they could escape. One young woman died after being pulled from the flood, possibly from the shock of the experience. Others were killed by the structural collapses the wave caused.
Several more people reportedly became ill from drinking the contaminated beer that pooled in the streets. Contemporary accounts describe local residents wading through the flood gathering beer in pots and cups. One story, disputed by historians, claims that people in nearby neighborhoods smelled the beer, heard what had happened, and came to fill containers from the streets.
What Happened Afterward
The brewery was taken to court. The case was ultimately dismissed on the grounds that the event was an act of God, a legal doctrine that held no one liable for unforeseeable natural disasters.
This is notable because it was obviously not an act of God. It was a failure of industrial infrastructure. But the legal frameworks of 1814 did not have good mechanisms for holding companies accountable for industrial accidents. That would come later, partly because of events like this one.
The five people who died at the wake were among the poorest residents of London. St. Giles was a notorious slum overcrowded with Irish immigrants and working-class families living in conditions of extreme poverty. Their deaths received some news coverage but no compensation and no lasting official acknowledgment.
The brewery was compensated by the government for the lost beer on the grounds of the beer's excise duty value.
Let that sink in. The brewery got paid. The families of the dead got nothing.
The London Beer Flood is strange enough to seem fictional. The ending is ordinary enough to seem completely real.
Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.
