One street

Botchergate

Forty-one of the venues on this site stand on one road. That is not an accident of planning or a modern drift towards a strip. The reason is four hundred years old.

Locked out after dark

Botchergate lay outside the city walls. Under an ordinance of Elizabeth I the gates were shut at nightfall, and anyone who arrived late was left on the wrong side of them. Hostelries and victuallers grew up to take those travellers in, and the trade never left.

Carlisle City Council's own conservation appraisal, written in 2012, puts it plainly: hostelries and victuallers sprang up outside the gates, and four hundred years on, that function still serves many buildings on the northern part of Botchergate. That is a planning document describing a street full of pubs and explaining them by an Elizabethan curfew.

Named after a Fleming

It was Botchardgate first, a township forming the southern approach to the city. When William Rufus took Carlisle in 1092 he granted land around it to a Flemish officer from his army called Bochard. Henry I confirmed the grant in a deed obliging Bochard to build a castle, not for his own use, to keep out the Scots and repopulate the district.

The suburb of Botcherby, across the Petteril, is the same man: first recorded in 1170, anglicised in the sixteenth century, absorbed into Carlisle in 1912. The medieval walls had three gates and all three survive as street names: the Irish or Caldew Gate west, the Scotch or Ricker Gate north, and the English or Botcher Gate south.

The road to London

Until the M6 opened in 1970, Botchergate was the main road between London and Glasgow. Everything on it faced a national trunk route. Smith's map of 1746 already shows it as the principal way south, framed by linear development. The 1821 Wood's map shows frontage buildings with workshops behind, on narrow burgage plots four to five metres wide whose outlines still govern the shopfronts today.

The 1901 map catches it at its peak: both sides densely terraced, businesses and manufacturers packed between the houses. The leper hospital of St Nicholas had stood at the southern end from about the twelfth century until it was sacked in the Civil War, and the area was used in the Roman period, burials included. In 1853 the first post box on mainland Britain went up here.

What it lost

Christ Church, built in 1830, was demolished in 1952; its site is the one piece of green space on the street. In the mid 1970s the terraces of King Street, Princess Street and Lord Street went in the slum clearances, and the population that supported the shops went with them.

Then in 2000 to 2003 the English Gate Plaza scheme took almost 150 metres of frontage. The conservation area had been designated in January 1994 to prevent exactly that. The council's verdict on what replaced it is that it is neutral, neither enhancing nor detracting, which is a quietly damning word from a planning officer. That ground now holds Rouge, Ballers, Deja Vu, and the sites of the lost Las Vegas Strip and Terminal.

The pubs

Two of Harry Redfern's pubs for the State Management Scheme stand on Botchergate. The Cumberland Inn of 1930 is Grade II listed and the least altered of all of them; the Earl Grey of 1935, his only building in a modern style, is a martial arts centre now and in the lost pubs archive as the Earl Grey.

The Caledonian opened in 1847 for the railway, the year the line to Scotland did. The Woodrow Wilson is the old Co-op department store. And the losses keep coming: the Crown at number 90, trading since at least 1822, is derelict now, and the street has lost a venue every few years since.

Every one of them, still trading or long gone: