CarlislePubs 🛍️ Lost pubs shopShop: T-shirts, hoodies, mugs & a jigsaw

Lost pub · Scotch Street

Ismay's Vaults

Gone 1923

Gone
Renamed the Market Tavern, 2 November 1916; closed 1923
There now
The listed building at 17 Scotch Street, in commercial use in 2018
Address
17 Scotch Street
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4011556120, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: commercial.

Named for G. Ismay, a Scotch Street wine and spirit merchant, and trading by the Market before 1829, at 17 Scotch Street. Thomas L. Gilkerson was the spirit merchant there in 1873, one of the Gilkersons of the Rising Sun a few doors up. A second Ismay's Vaults, possibly only a beerhouse, stood on Collier Lane off Botchergate, attached to the Hare & Hounds, from about 1880 to 1916.

It was one of the many Carlisle pubs the Central Control Board renamed when it took over in 1916. The scheme acquired it that August, and the Local Committee of the Control Board took the decision at its meeting on Wednesday 1 November 1916; the Cumberland News of 4 November printed the manager's report, by which Ismay's Vaults, Scotch Street, was to become the Market Tavern, and the Evening News and Star recorded the change on 2 November. The same report names the Market Tavern (Ismay's Vaults) among the seventeen houses selected for the 'off' sale of spirits in Carlisle.

A record that has Nanson's Vaults on West Tower Street renamed the Market Tavern that day looks like a slip: the Committee's decision was to rename Nanson's the Tower Tavern. Historic England's gazetteer sides with Ismay's: it lists Ismay's Vaults at 17 Scotch Street as the later Market Tavern, and has Nanson's Vaults as the Tower Tavern, which the scheme held only on a lease and shut in 1918. By the same account the Market Tavern closed in 1923. The early nineteenth-century building is listed grade II and was in commercial use in 2018.

Sources 5

Open question

An unsolved mystery

One record closes Ismay's Vaults in 1890, yet the scheme acquired it in 1916. Was it shut for a spell and reopened, or does the 1890 date belong to another house, perhaps the second Ismay's Vaults on Collier Lane?

If you know the answer, or where it might be found (an old photograph, a family story, a document), tell us and it goes into the story above.

Tell us about Ismay's Vaults

Also lost on Scotch Street

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

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs