Is London a drinking town?
You can still find pockets. Course you can.
But realistically, these days?
Manchester.
Glasgow.
Nottingham.
They’d all give it a run for its money.
Once upon a time though…
London wasn’t just a drinking town,
it may just have been the drinking capital of the world.
And it wasn’t powered by craft beer, porter or carbonated lagers we see today.
It ran on something far more potent.
Mother’s Ruin.
Gin.
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The Spirit That Took Over a City
Gin arrived in London in the late 1600s from the Netherlands.
Not in chalice glasses.
No cucumber garnish.
Not with half of grandads herb garden floating in it.
No, this was bathtub clobber.
Distilled in back rooms.
Knocked up in tenements.
Sold for pennies.
As the saying went:
“Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence.’
And by god, London obliged.
It was said that the average street by the mid 1700s had four gin dens on it.
Theses weren’t licensed premise, no, anything went here, regulation around the poison itself was light and the space non existent.
No licensing.
No quality control.
No botanicals.
Just raw, burning juniper juice.
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The Perfect Storm
Then came the perfect storm. Bumper grain harvests flooded the market and farmers needed to shift their surplus and obliging distillers hoovered it up. Production exploded, London drank.
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A City Slowed to a Stagger
Productivity, a word you hear chucked about at dispatch boxes and broadsheet newspapers, collapsed.
Hard to row a lighter across the Thames or steer a Hackney carriage with a pint of gin inside you.
Great time to be in the business of empressment though. These were gangs that roamed the streets licensed by the crown to drag unemployed, cut lads from bar stools onto ships bound for war and during the gin craze it was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Social Ruin
The damage was immense.
Gin tore through working-class London with a speed not unlike the Great Fire, a mere fifty years earlier.
Families collapsed, crime rocketed and whole neighbourhoods dissolved into drunkenness.
The Gin Craze didn’t just get London drunk, It nearly tore it apart.
The city was pissed, social order unravelling and down in Westminster, parliament was watching.
Is London a drinking town?
Next time, we’ll delve into what was done to get on top of this gin-inspired mess and how it led to the birth of the country’s greatest export in its history, the public house.
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