London Beer Flood
On October seventeenth, eighteen hundred fourteen, a disaster hit Meux & Co's Horse Shoe Brewery in London. One huge wooden vat of fermenting porter burst when an iron band around it slipped. The leak made another nearby vat fail, and a flood of beer—between about one hundred twenty-eight thousand and three hundred twenty-three thousand imperial gallons—rushed out.
The force of the flood destroyed the back wall of the brewery and sent beer into the St Giles rookery, a crowded slum behind the site. A wave up to about fifteen feet high washed into streets and homes, destroying several houses. Eight people were killed, including a four-year-old girl named Hannah Bamfield and two mourners at a wake being held nearby.
An inquest ruled that the deaths happened casually, accidentally, and by misfortune. The accident nearly bankrupted the brewery, but they later recovered some money from the government and kept trading. The disaster helped push the brewing industry to stop using large wooden vats and move toward metal or lined tanks.
Meux & Co continued brewing after the flood but moved to a new site in Nine Elms in eighteen seventy‑one, and the Horse Shoe site was later cleared. The Dominion Theatre now stands where the brewery used to be. Meux & Co eventually went bankrupt in nineteen sixty‑one.
Context: Meux was one of London’s two biggest brewers in the early nineteen hundreds, along with Whitbread. They bought the Horse Shoe Brewery in eighteen hundred nine and built a giant wooden vat to store porter. Porter was London’s most popular beer at the time and was aged in these vats for months.
The London Beer Flood is remembered as a stark example of how a single industrial accident can devastate a neighborhood and change brewing practices for years to come.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:12 (CET).