The London Beer Flood of 1814

The explosion set off a chain reaction, knocking the valve off an adjoining cask and bursting open several more. Between 128,000 and 323,000 gallons of beer flooded into the streets.

The brewery stood at the corner of Great Russell Street and Tottenham Court Road, surrounded by the St. Giles Rookery—an eight-acre warren of tenements that housed prostitutes, criminals, and the desperately poor. The artist William Hogarth had used the neighborhood as the setting for his print Gin Lane. Buildings in the rookery were crammed together and subdivided into single-room dwellings, many of them basements. When the wave of beer struck, it smashed through walls and poured into those underground rooms.

Eight people died. Five of them were mourners attending a wake for a two-year-old boy; the wave caught them in a ground-floor room. A fourteen-year-old servant was buried under the collapsed brewery wall while washing pots in a pub's yard. Two others, a mother and her daughter, were killed while having tea.

The coroner's inquest, held two days later, returned a verdict of "an act of God." This freed Meux and Company from any liability to pay compensation to the families of the dead. The brewery lost about £23,000—roughly £1.25 million today—but Parliament waived their beer tax for the year and awarded them an additional £7,250 for the destroyed product, saving the company from bankruptcy.

The disaster prompted the brewing industry to phase out large wooden vats in favor of lined concrete vessels. The Horse Shoe Brewery was demolished in 1922; a theater now occupies part of the site.