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
- Where exactly
- On Fusehill Street. The exact spot isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.
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. 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 campus itself has a harder history than the fell names suggest. The Grade II listed buildings around the bar went up as the Union Workhouse in 1864, served as a war hospital in both wars and then as the City General and the City Maternity Hospital, and were taken by St Martin's College in 1998. A blue plaque recording all that went up on Skiddaw in June 2026. A great many Carlisle people were born a few yards from where the students drank.
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.
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.