Pagoda Nightclub

Built

Built 1970-71 as Olivetti's Carlisle branch, by Ted Cullinan

Gone

Closing date not recorded; disused by 2023

There now

The Olivetti building

Where exactly

On Lancaster Street. The exact spot isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.

A nightclub in a piece of serious architecture. The building went up between 16 November 1970 and 30 August 1971 as the Carlisle branch of the typewriter and office-equipment firm Olivetti, one of four that Ted Cullinan designed for them, with Belfast, Derby and Dundee: a low courtyard building of prefabricated plywood trusses and glued Finnish birch panels, with movable office modules inside and a roof painted Olivetti yellow.

Olivetti did not need it for long. The two accounts of what came next disagree on the order: Cullinan's own practice has it a Chinese restaurant, then a nightclub, then a carpet store; an architectural study of the four branches has the nightclub first and the restaurant after. Either way the roof was repainted and cut for windows, a warehouse filled the courtyard and the inside was opened into one big space. It was trading as the Pagoda by the mid-to-late 1970s and was later renamed Freedom. It was a gig venue too: Mega City Four, Thee Hypnotics and Little Angels played it in 1989, Adorable in 1992 and the Wedding Present in February 1993.

Its last use was the strangest. By 2023 it stood empty, soundproofed and nearly windowless, and on 10 May 2023 police found a cannabis farm inside, with a street value put at £4.56 million: the largest haul ever recovered in Cumbria, in the judge's words.

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

Still serving nearby

• Gallaghers

  City Centre

• Carlisle South End Constitutional Club

  City Centre

• The Roadhouse Hotel

  London Road

• Smiley's

  City Centre