An Unavoidable Act of God? The Odd Tragedy of the Great London Beer Flood of 1814
The Horseshoe Brewery, owned by the business conglomerate Meux & Company was located at the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street in London’s west end, a part of the parish of St. Giles, one of 19th century London’s most notorious slum neighborhoods. Today, what was once the site of the Horseshoe Brewery is home to the fashionable Dominion Theatre, and is now surrounded by upscale hotels and restaurants. But back in 1814 the area, then known as St. Giles rookery, was a dense collection of closely packed tenement dwellings and slum cottages. It was one of nineteenth century London’s poorest neighborhoods, home to thousands of destitute Irish immigrants who lived underground in densely packed dank cellars, or in large families crammed into small one room apartments with little ventilation and few accessible outdoor exits. On the afternoon of October 17, 1814 a seven hundred pound iron rung slipped from an enormous wooden vat containing approximately 1...