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Lost pub · Rickergate

Bay Horse

1864 to 1916

Built
Built 1864, on the site of the Alma Inn
Gone
Closed by the Board, 19 October 1916; the building stood until 1937
There now
Carlisle Civic Centre. The pub building stood until 1937
Address
29 Rickergate
Where exactly
Under the Civic Centre, between the former Durham Ox Lane and Bay Horse Lane.

Stood at 29 Rickergate, between Durham Ox Lane and Bay Horse Lane, the second of which is named after it, so the pub outlived itself in the street plan. It was two blocks south of the Fox & Hounds. It was built in 1864 on the site of the Alma Inn, and was a Carlisle Old Brewery house and then a Maryport Brewery one.

Hugh McGrath, who had moved from the Crown Inn on Corporation Road to the White Horse on English Street in 1855, signed the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867 for a Bay Horse, most likely this one. John Little kept it in 1884, when Bulmer's calls it the Bay Horse Hotel. In October 1885 its licence was renewed to the incoming tenant, Pultney Corry, at the adjourned licensing day, a misunderstanding between the outgoing and incoming tenants having kept it from the main sessions. In March 1886 the licence passed from Pultney Corrie to J. R. Paterson, manager of the Old Brewery Company, which held the house as tenant.

The Cumberland News of 18 January 1991 printed John Foster's memories of Rickergate, where he was born on 4 August 1914. He recalled the Bay Horse Hotel as standing beyond Dermott the hairdresser's, with Bay Horse Lane and its families alongside, and 'Ma Peat', who owned the Bay Horse, living near the hotel. Unlike the Bay Horse, he said, the Fox and Hounds was one of the street's licensed houses that survived until the early 1960s.

The Board closed it on 19 October 1916; the Cumberland News of 21 October 1916 names the Bay Horse Inn, Rickergate, as one of two fully licensed houses closed that week. Historic England's gazetteer tells it differently: the Bay Horse reopened after the October 1916 closure, was converted by the scheme in 1917 and closed for good in 1931. The Board's own sale notices weigh against a reopening. On 30 April 1919 it put number 29 Rickergate up for auction at the Victoria Hotel, through Fred Telford, as 'all that well-built house and shop, formerly the Bay Horse Inn, with the yard and outbuildings', and Telford advertised it again by private treaty on 7 June.

By one record the building outlasted the pub by twenty-one years and was demolished in 1937. The gazetteer puts the demolition at about 1964, a date taken from the building of the Civic Centre rather than from a record of the demolition itself. Carlisle's Civic Centre, put up in 1964 and the city's only tower block, covers the sites of four state-owned pubs: this one, the Drove Inn, the Fox & Hounds and the Three Crowns.

Photograph

Black and white photograph of a tall three-storey building cased in scaffolding, its rendering stripped and its neighbour gone, with a row of columns at the ground floor and a car parked at the right
The Bay Horse Hotel, Rickergate, being demolished Cumbria Image Bank, image ct32217, used with permission

Sources 12

Location from geograph.org.uk. The pin marks the site.

Also lost on Rickergate

45 other lost pubs stood within 250 m of here. See them on the map

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs