Remembering the London Beer Flood

On this day 200 years ago, a crowd of unlucky Londoners learned the hard way that there’s no such thing as a free drink. In what came to be known as the London Beer Flood, collapsing vats at the Horseshoe Brewery sent an incredible 323,000 gallons of beer into the streets of London. The idea of a vast Tsunami of ale may be the stuff some people’s dreams are made of, but the results were anything but a laughing matter. Two nearby buildings were all but washed away by the flood and eight people were killed. Among them was 4-year-old Hannah Bamfield, who The Times described as being “dashed to pieces” against a partition while having tea in a first-floor room. Down in a nearby basement, five mourners—four women and a 3-year-old boy—were drowned while they were themselves attending a wake for a young boy who had just died.

That the beer flood caused such damage and loss of life says a lot about the neighborhood where it took place. By 1814, the Parish of St. Giles was a teeming, poverty-stricken quarter swollen with recent immigrants from Ireland. Later to become a setting for several of Dickens’ grimier scenes, it was a ramshackle area of blow-me-down buildings and narrow courts where even the basements were full to the rafters.