History's A Disaster
Bloody history and bloodier crimes. Andrew takes a weekly look at all things bloody. From natural disasters to man made atrocities
History's A Disaster
The London Beer Flood of 1814
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.
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According to the band Psycho Stick, beer is good and stuff, but do you know when beer is not good? When it's flowing down your street in a giant tidal wave, destroying houses and knocking down buildings and, well, drowning your neighbors. And that's exactly what happened on October 17th 1814, in the London neighborhood of St Giles's Rookery. So what happened? I'm Andrew and this is History's A Disaster. And tonight we are diving into and taking a swim through the London Beer Flood, which started at the Horseshoe Brewery on the corner of Great Russell Street and Tottenham Court, london, a very poor and densely populated slum with dirt, cheap housing and shitty tenement buildings, and it would eventually become London's fourth largest brewery. And back then, one of the biggest attractions to the London breweries was the large storage vats of Porter. Now, if you're like me, you have no clue what a porter is. I'm, admittedly not much of a drinker, so the different types of beer are a bit of a mystery to me, but a porter is a dark English ale that was started in the 1700s and was popular with dock workers, hence the name porter. The beer is made from brown malt and hops porter and requires months of aging before it's ready, hence the need for large vats. And speaking of these large vats, I'd totally Scrooge McDuck the hell out of one. How often are you going to get the chance to swim in a big ass barrel of beer? You know? Doing the backstroke in some Budweiser, maybe doing the breaststroke in the bush and that was not an innuendo, by the way. Get your mind out of the gutter, you dirty perv. I in no way just wanted to say stroke and bush in the same sentence. And let's be real here, my ass sinks, and admittedly not that great of a swimmer, so it'd be more like the doggy paddle in some Milwaukee's Best Basic ass swimming style in the shittiest beer ever made. But anyways, forget all that. These large vats were something of a tourist attraction for the brewery. The bigger the vat, the better the attraction, because obviously bigger is always better. Bigger is always better. In 1764, the biggest vats held roughly 1,500 barrels worth of beer in each one. And these vats would go on to get bigger and bigger and of course eventually bigger becomes more likely to fail, showing that bigger sometimes is not always better. And that's exactly what happened in 1814.
Speaker 1:On the afternoon of Monday, october 17th 1814, around 4.30 pm, storehouse clerk George Creek inspected one of the 22-foot-tall wooden vats, reinforced with heavy iron loops, in which this black beer fermented. As he looked around he noticed that a 700-pound loop had fallen off an enormous cask that stored a 10-month-old batch of porter. Now, george had been around for a while. He'd been with the brewery for 17 long years and knew that this happened a few times a year. So no big deal. These 22 foot tall vats were filled almost to the top with beer. Only the last four inches of the top were not filled. The beer was still fermenting and the pressure from the fermentation process would cause the barrel to expand. So a broken loop, no big deal. He'd leave a note for his boss about it and his boss would just shrug it off and leave another note for a maintenance guy to get around to fixing the loop. Problem solved nothing to worry about. Nothing bad could possibly come from a silly ass broken loop.
Speaker 1:About an hour after the inspection, a large explosion rocked the storeroom. The vat with the fucked up ring blew itself up, sending over 300,000 gallons the equivalent of over 1 million pints of beer spilling out. The blast smashed the valve off its neighbor. That had another 1,000 barrels worth of beer in it. In total, there was now nearly 600 tons of beer smashing through the storehouse, breaking open more vats and barrels and adding to the growing flood. The force of the explosion was bad enough to break open the rear wall of the storehouse, sending bricks flying over the tops of homes on nearby Great Russell Street. The brick walls surrounding the brewery collapsed, claiming the flood's first victim. Eleanor Cooper, a 14-year-old barmaid working at Tavistock Arms on the backside of the brewery, was outside cleaning pots at the water pump that sat in the shadow of this 20-foot tall wall. When it collapsed outwards, it buried her in the rubble.
Speaker 1:The wave of beer, now 15 feet tall, smashed through the wall and onto New Street and since there was no type of drainage in the streets and St Giles was built on flat, low-lying ground, the beer had nowhere to go except into the streets and neighboring homes and businesses. Anything in its path was smashed and swept down the street. Lower levels of homes were flooded, others were smashed completely, while a few were moved off of their foundations. The shitty shacks around the brewery were crushed under the weight of the flood. The flood would fill the cellars and first floors of the tenement buildings, causing many residents to jump on tables and chairs to escape the rapidly spreading beer. New Street, where the flood started, would suffer the worst.
Speaker 1:When the flood rushed through, mary Banfield was sitting and enjoying tea time with her four-year-old daughter, hannah, and one of her little friends. All three of them would be swept away in the deluge. Mary and the other little girl would spend time in the hospital before recovering. Hannah would not be so lucky and drowned in the flood. The beer would end up smashing down her tenement building. In the basement of the building was Anne Saville and four others Mary Mulvey and her three-year-old son, thomas Murray, elizabeth Smith and Katherine Butler. Anne's two-year-old son had just died the day before. Her friends were over to help her in her grief and to prepare to hold a wake for her son. They were just waiting for their husbands and sons to get home from work when the flood smashed the building down. All five women would die in the rubble. Later on, in another tenement, another child, sarah Bates, would also be found dead. No one in the brewery was killed, although three workers would have to be rescued from the collapsed brewery.
Speaker 1:The St Giles neighborhood, once drowning in poverty, was now drowning in porter. Everything was covered in beer as the 15-foot wave of beer rushed through the slum. It would be months before the smell of beer would start to fade away. Now, once the flood finally started to recede, rescue workers drenched head to toe in the warm liquor, waded through waist-deep alcohol, picking through wood and bricks, trying desperately to rescue anyone trapped in the rubble. Wood and bricks trying desperately to rescue anyone trapped in the rubble. Some of the workers would try to comfort the panicked neighbors and loved ones of those still missing in the flood. They needed them quiet so they could hear the soft moans and cries of those trapped in the rubble.
Speaker 1:Now there's rumors and myths that people were gathered in the streets and collecting beer and just partying it up were gathered in the streets and collecting beer and just partying it up, along with there being a potential ninth victim who died days later of alcohol poisoning. Since none of this was ever reported by newspapers at the time, this is most likely not true and just urban myths that sprang up in the years following the tragedy. The newspapers actively did not like the Irish and were no friends to the immigrants that made up the St Giles neighborhood, so if some shit like this had actually happened, they would have definitely reported on it. Instead, they were rather respectful in their reporting and mentioned how awful the scene was and compared it to the devastation left behind by a fire or earthquake. After the flood, watchmen at the brewery would charge visitors to view the destroyed vats and they would have plenty of business. Hundreds came out to view the scene. I mean, come on, who wouldn't want to check it out? Much like a car or train wreck. Today, everyone wants to take a peek at shit that got fucked up.
Speaker 1:A coroner's inquest would be held on the 19th at a workhouse in the St Giles Parish. The coroner, george Hodgson, oversaw the entire thing. After reading out the names and ages of the victims, he took the jurors to the site of the flood. They toured the ruined brewery and viewed the dead before hearing testimony from witnesses. The first witness was good old George Creek, who saw the whole thing and had a brother who was injured in the collapse of the brewery wall. He would explain to the jurors how these iron loops fail a couple times a year and is normally not a problem. Richard Hauser, the owner of the Tavistock Arms, and several others came forward to offer their testimony. Also, the jury would return a verdict that the eight victims had died casually, accidentally and by misfortune. And seriously, what the fuck? Obviously never drowned before in a flood, but I'm pretty sure there's nothing fucking casual about it. Along with this asinine verdict. They would rule the flood as an act of God, so no one was at fault.
Speaker 1:The flood would end up costing the owners of the brewery the equivalent of 1.5 million in today's currency in damages, but they were able to reclaim paid excise tax, so they would pretty much break even and would stay in operation for another hundred years After it closed in 1921, the Dominion Theater now stands in its place, which you know what. That's just great for the brewery. They didn't lose much in the accident. However, the residents of the neighborhood were not so fortunate. They received nothing and were just shit out of luck. Since it was an act of God and definitely was no fault of the brewery at all, they would not have to pay any type of compensation to the victim's families. During the funeral for the eight victims of the flood, thousands would come out to pay their respects and leave pennies and shillings for the poor families to pay for the funerals.
Speaker 1:Eventually, they would start to phase out these wooden vats and replace them with concrete vessels. The square concrete vessels would be lined with resin, slate, enamel or asphalt, which you know what. That's exactly what I want in my beer. Just a touch of asphalt straight from the roadway, and would that make the saying one for the road, one from the road, and I don't know what's worse.
Speaker 1:This or around the start of the 1900s, they started using mild steel to ferment beer. The acid in the beer would cause the steel to rust and the rust would give the beer a noticeable metallic taste. So what do you prefer in your beer, asphalt or rust? Either way, I think I'll pass. Eventually, they would go on to settle on stainless steel as the preferred material for industrial fermentation that is used today. And that was the London Beer Flood, one of the more unique disasters to take place in London. If you like the show, please consider leaving a rating or review on your app of choice, and you can always reach the show at historiesand, whether it be Facebook, instagram or whatever other ones. I'm on TikTok and Blue Sky and I'm on a bunch of them, except X, because well, fuck X. And don't forget share the episode, because sharing is caring, and if there was more caring in the world, maybe history wouldn't be a disaster. Thanks and goodbye.