The Horse Shoe Brewery of Meux and Company stood at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, hard against the St Giles rookery — one of London’s most notorious slums, where families lived packed into cellars and back rooms.
Brewing porter at scale was an arms race in vat size. The brewery’s great vats stood over 20 feet tall, held together by massive iron hoops, each containing thousands of barrels of maturing dark beer.
17 October 1814
At about 16:30, storehouse clerk George Crick noticed that one of the 700-pound iron hoops had slipped off a vat containing over 130,000 gallons of ten-month-old porter. Hoops slipped two or three times a year; nobody considered it urgent. A written note was passed to a partner.
Roughly an hour later the vat burst. The blast of liquid smashed the neighbouring vats and casks in a chain reaction, releasing a combined total commonly put at over 320,000 gallons. The brewery’s back wall collapsed outward, and a wave of porter perhaps 15 feet high rolled into the streets of St Giles.
The flood demolished two houses and smashed through the wall of the Tavistock Arms pub, where 14-year-old barmaid Eleanor Cooper was buried under the rubble. In New Street, the wave poured into basements where whole families lived. Mary Banfield and her daughter Hannah were taking tea; both were killed. In another cellar, an Irish wake was being held for a two-year-old boy — four mourners drowned.
Eight people died, all of them women and children, most of them poor Irish residents of the rookery.
An act of God
Crowds waded in to scoop up free beer; contemporary reports of a ninth victim dying of alcohol poisoning days later are unverified and likely embellishment. The stench of stale porter reportedly hung over the district for months.
The inquest jury returned a verdict that the deaths were “casually, accidentally and by misfortune” — an act of God. Meux and Company faced no liability. Better still for the firm, it successfully petitioned Parliament for a refund of the excise duty already paid on the lost beer, saving it from ruin.
The disaster helped push the industry away from giant wooden vats towards lined concrete ones. The brewery itself was demolished in 1922; the Dominion Theatre now stands on the site.