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Lost pub · Longtown

Monkhouse's Spirit Vaults

Gone
Closing date not recorded
There now
Not recorded
Address
Longtown
Where exactly
In Longtown. The exact spot isn't known, so the pin marks the town, not the building. The position is approximate.

Longtown's spirit vaults, a six-day house that shut on Sundays, and by 1909 in the Monkhouse family for eighty years. It was the 'six-day licence for a house in Longtown' renewed at the brewster sessions of 1890, and the one spirit vault among the thirty-one licences of the Longtown division in 1893.

In 1909 the Longtown justices referred it to the Cumberland Compensation Authority as redundant, with three other houses in the town, and it was the only one of the four to fight. R. H. Monkhouse, who owned it and had kept it for eleven years, briefed a barrister, Rigby Swift. The police superintendent said it had no bedrooms and no food unless people went into the barman's house, and was used purely as a drinking bar, though he had no complaint about it and had heard it did a good trade. It was 'not the most important licensed house in Longtown. There were three better and three worse': the Bush, the Graham Arms and the Globe, now the Tavern, were better.

The town sergeant had paid it seventeen visits and found a lower class of customer in the bar than in the front, nine on average between eight and ten at night against twenty-two at the Bush: the people who went where they could get the cheapest drink. 'Well, you would not expect them to be drinking champagne,' said Swift. 'They're the people who won't work,' said the sergeant, to laughter.

Swift put in the figures: 145, 115 and 119 barrels of beer in 1906, 1907 and 1908, 2,244 dozen bottles of beer a year, and about 2,015 gallons of spirits, half of it drunk on the premises and the rest sold wholesale. Monkhouse had spent about £500 on the house since 1899. The authority renewed the licence and sent the other three, the Scotch Arms, the Marquis of Granby and the George & Dragon, for compensation.

No record says when the vaults closed. The Board took over seven licensed houses in Longtown in 1916 and closed four of them, and the vaults may have been one.

Sources

Also lost in Longtown

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

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs