Credit: Brewers’ Journal via Wikimedia Commons
Pop the kettle on and make yourself comfy, folks. Because I’m back by popular demand absolutely no demand whatsoever with another Secret London history lesson for you. And today’s topic of choice? Oh, you know, just that time when the streets of the capital city were flooded with almost 1.5 million litres of beer. Yes, really…
Allow me to set the scene for you. The year was 1814. The place was the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road. It seems as though Londoners have always been pretty keen on having the biggest and best of things, because inside this particular brewery was an outrageously large tank of beer. A wooden tank, to be specific – held together with big iron rings. The tank measured approximately 22 feet in height, and was filled to the brim with around 320,000 gallons of beer. What could possibly go wrong, hey?
The London Beer Flood
On October 17, 1814, a storehouse clerk noticed that one of the tank’s iron rings had broken and slipped out of place. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, and so it wasn’t treated as a matter of urgency. What happened next, however, certainly hadn’t occurred before. The tank exploded, and the force of the explosion caused the back wall of the brewery to burst open, too. Many surrounding barrels and tanks also split open. And gallons upon gallons of hot fermenting porter ale began to sweep through the streets. Can you beer-lieve it?
Credit: @visualiselondon via IG
The sheer quantity of cascading beer created a 15-foot wave that demolished everything in its path. Houses were being destroyed, and eight people were killed in the flood. It’s rumoured that some Londoners were scooping up the free beer and drinking it right off the street. So much so that a ninth victim of the disaster apparently died from alcohol poisoning. It’s thought that between 600,000 and 1.4 million litres of beer escaped the brewery that day, causing a tsunami of ale to gush through the streets of the city.
The brewery was taken to court, but the disaster was ruled an ‘Act of God’, leaving nobody responsible. They were actually reimbursed around £7250 to cover some of the costs of the lost beer. This compensation, quite literally, saved the Horse Shoe Brewery from bankruptcy, and meant that it could continue trading for another 100 years or so. The incident also changed beer-brewing forever, as wooden fermentation tanks were replaced with far sturdier concrete vats from that point on.
The Horse Shoe Brewery was demolished in 1922, and the Dominion Theatre is now perched in its place. But I can almost guarantee that the action taking place on that stage is nowhere near as dramatic as the events that unfolded in the very same spot over 200 years ago.