For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

The London Beer Flood (10.01.12)

The spot where Freddy Mercury stands strutting his stuff, some 200 years ago was one of the most deprived areas of London and the scene of the Capital’s most bizarre tragedy.

Before New Oxford Street was constructed the area behind Centre Point, the St. Giles area, was a rookery where some of the poorest of London lived in dirty, cramped conditions, and on the boundary of the rookery, on the site of the Dominion Theatre stood the Meux’s Brewery.

A popular beer at that time was porter, a dark beer which originated in London during the early 18th century. Prior to that beer was distributed to the publican “very young” and ageing was performed in the ale house, porter was the first beer to be aged at the brewery and dispatched to be drunk immediately. It was also the first beer which could be made on a large scale, and as it was invented in London and drunk by London’s porters it naturally became known as London Porter.

Working in London’s markets were thousands of porters and manual labourers who would daily consume three or four pints of this dark heady brew that had an alcohol content of between 6.6 and 7.0% ABV.

The brewing process of porter enabled producers to make it on an industrial scale, building ever larger vats to accommodate its growing demand. Meux’s Brewery Company had by 1795 vats 22-foot high that could contain 8.4 million pints of beer. So large were these barrels, upon the completion of a new one a reception would be held and one account relates that 200 diners sat down to a meal within its gigantic walls.

This highly profitable enterprise came to an end on Monday 17th October 1814 at about six in the evening, when a corroded hoop on a large barrel prompted the sudden release of over 2 million pints of this heavy brown liquid. The explosion could be heard 5 miles away. It destroyed the brewery wall and badly damaged two houses. Some were drowned by the tsunami of beer and others were overcome by the fumes, while an even greater number were hampered in rescue while using pots to collect this manna from heaven. The area, as today, was very flat and rescuers were sometimes up to their waists in beer trying to evacuate people from their basements.

Some nine people died that day as a direct result of the accident, and one victim died some days later of alcohol poisoning; he had heroically attempted to stem the tide by drinking as much beer as he humanly could.

As with the way of the poor in those days, to try and make ends meet families displayed the victim in their house propped up in an armchair for inspection at a small fee. In one house so many crowded into the room that the floor collapsed, the spectators plunging into the basement, which was of course full of beer.

The smell of beer lasted for months and many lost their homes and livelihoods, while the Meux Brewery was taken to court over the accident, but the calamity was ruled an Act of God with the death simply casualties.

Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi once said: “Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune”. He could have been talking about 18th-century London.