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Lost pub · Rickergate

Blue Bell Inn

Gone 1917

Gone
April 1917
There now
Carlisle Magistrates Court extension
Address
10 Rickergate
Where exactly
Under the modern Magistrates' Court extension, which was the bus station for a time. Placed between the Malt Shovel and the Scotch Arms, the order of the houses in Kelly's directories and on the Ordnance Survey map of 1865, which labels the Blue Bell Inn north of the street's other west-side inns. The position is approximate.

At 10 Rickergate: 36 in Parson and White's directory of 1829, becoming 10 when the street was renumbered about 1880, across the road from the Ship Inn. A Cumberland News column of 22 March 1991 counted it as one of three Blue Bells in the city centre, the others being in St Cuthbert's Lane and Scotch Street. A yard behind had great stabling, a skittle alley and a quoiting pitch. The Co-operative Society store flanked the pub on the south side; on the north side, after the yard entrance, came Granny Medin's broth shop and Sproat's clog shop, then the Malt Shovel.

Edward Forster is an innkeeper in Rickergate in Jollie's directory of 1811 and held the Blue Bell in the 1829 directory, and when the Carlisle Journal put it up for sale in July 1832 it noted that Forster had by then been tenant for very nearly forty years. Joseph Trimble is named as victualler in the 1847 directory, and the Cumberland News's 1933 list of the two streets' licensed houses still has him there in the 1860s. Mr Tremble had the Blue Bell in November 1853, when a heifer that had strayed from the Ship lower down the street was to be brought back to him.

Dennis McCauley, a 28-year-old from Ireland, is the innkeeper of the 1861 census, and D. McCauley signed the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867 for a Blue Bell, very probably this one. He opened the Star Music Hall on Rickergate on 25 June 1877 and later ran the Scotch Arms Hotel next door: one Rickergate entrepreneur across three ventures over several decades.

A photograph reproduced in Carlisle: The Archive Photographs names J. Black as tenant. By the 1891 census Jane Hope, 57 and from Kirklinton, was running the house, and in September 1897 the magistrates granted a temporary transfer of its licence from Mrs Tully to Mr Routledge. Joseph Black, 30 and born at Great Orton, appears as innkeeper in 1901 and died at the Blue Bell Hotel on 21 October 1907, aged 36.

It was a Carlisle Old Brewery house when the scheme acquired it in August 1916, and it closed in April 1917. The 1991 column set the site where the Ribble bus garage was later built, below the police station; for a while the cleared ground was the bus station, and it is now under the modern extension to Carlisle Magistrates' Court, which may also cover part of the Scotch Arms. Not the Blue Bell Hotel on Scotch Street, which lasted until 1973, or the Blue Bell at Dalston, which is still open.

Photograph

Old photograph of a stone inn painted Joseph Black and Blue Bell Hotel, with a spirit store window full of Hennessy's brandy and Carlisle Old Brewery advertisements, a man and a woman in a white apron at the door, a large dog lying on the pavement and an arch marked Good Stabling
The Blue Bell, Rickergate, around 1902 Cumbria Image Bank, image ct01648, used with permission

Sources 9

Location from geograph.org.uk. The pin is approximate.

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