Lost pub · Fusehill Street
Calva Bar
- Built
- A students' union bar on a campus of 1864
- Gone
- Licence surrendered 27 September 2021
- There now
- The university still lists Calva among its campus facilities, so the room may survive without a bar
- Address
- University of Cumbria, Fusehill Street
The students' union bar at the University of Cumbria's Fusehill Street campus, with a beer garden, food and a stage. Skiddle listed it as a live venue and it ran open mic nights and gigs for years. It was licensed under grandfather rights from November 2005 and the register records a run of changes of supervisor through 2013, 2016 and 2019. Then the licence was cancelled, effective 27 September 2021 and completed that October.
Whether anything is still poured there is not clear; the university's own pages still list Calva among the campus facilities and tell conference guests they can use it, but that is marketing copy and the licence is gone. The name follows the campus. The university names its buildings after Cumbrian fells, so the Skiddaw Building holds the dining room and Blencathra sits beside it. Calva is the fell north of Skiddaw.
The ground has a harder history than the fell names suggest. Plans for a new Union Workhouse at Fusehill Street were approved in 1862, designed by Henry Lockwood and William Mawson of Bradford, and it opened in 1864 at a cost of £11,195 and fifteen shillings. It was built for 478 and held 275 on opening: men in the left wing, women in the right, the sick and elderly in the infirmary that is now Blencathra.
The men worked the six acres outside, the women did needlework and laundry. Both buildings are Grade II listed. One detail from the workhouse is worth carrying. Children born in it had their birth certificates made out to 6 Broad Street, the road down the left-hand side where the main entrance stood, rather than to the workhouse itself. It was done deliberately to spare them the stigma in later life.
Somebody in Victorian Carlisle thought about what a line on a certificate would cost a child at forty. Then it went to war twice. In 1917 the buildings were commandeered as a war hospital, the workhouse residents moved out across the city, and 9,809 wounded men were treated here by around eighty nurses and medical staff. It served as a military hospital again in the Second World War, became the City General under the NHS in 1948, and Blencathra was the City Maternity Hospital until everything moved to the Cumberland Infirmary in 1999.
A great many Carlisle people were born a few yards from where the students drank. St Martin's College took the site in 1998 and became part of the University of Cumbria in 2007. In June 2026 the Civic Trust and the university put a blue plaque on Skiddaw recording the workhouse and the war hospital. The bar outlasted the maternity hospital by twenty-two years.
Know anything about this one?
What's above is everything on file, and it isn't much. If you drank in it, or your family did, or you've a photograph of it, that's more than the records hold.