The Gin Craze - When England was DRunk

This British history podcast tells the story of the The Gin Craze  -  Britain's biggest drug epidemic

In eighteenth-century London, cheap gin transformed the nation's capital into a city gripped by addiction. Where violence, neglect and despair became part of everyday life. Mothers abandoned their children, families pawned everything they owned for another drink, and crime reached terrifying new heights.

Gin Craze sign

In this podcast, we tell the story of the most shocking crime of the age: poor three-year-old Mary Dufour, whose mother abandoned her to sell her baby’s  clothes for a bottle of gin.

We hear how a fashionable Dutch spirit, brought to England with William of Orange, became the drink that nearly destroyed Georgian London.

We tell the story of gin shops where you could be "Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence", the secret Puss and Mew vending machines that kept illegal sellers in business and the corrupt informers who sparked riots across the capital.

William Hogarth

Hear how Henry Fielding and William Hogarth's campaign to expose the horrors of addiction through the unforgettable image of Gin Lane.

This is the extraordinary story of how Britain lost control of gin, the devastating human cost of the Gin Craze, and the remarkable reforms that finally brought one of the darkest chapters in London's history to an end.

Listen to the Gin Craze podcast here: