Lost pub · Scotland Road
Spider & Fly
- Gone
- Closed around 2025
- There now
- Not established
- Address
- 1 Scotland Road, Stanwix
- Where exactly
- On Scotland Road. The exact spot isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.
The bar at the foot of Stanwix, first over Eden Bridge on the road north, and one of the better rooms the city has had recently. It took the premises that had been the Hourglass, which opened there in September 2007, and changed the name in October 2017. Ilka Rhoades and Alex Murrell were behind it, with Ali Vaughan responsible for the interior, and the local paper made a feature of it when it opened. It spent real money on the place: gold leaf on the walls catching the light off the lamps, glazed white tiles, bare timber.
The name came from a Rolling Stones track of the mid-sixties, and the bar played it both ways: its own strapline was the line the Stones had leaned on, from Mary Howitt's poem, will you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly. The kitchen took consistently good notices for as long as it ran.
It closed quietly. No closure was announced, the listings sites spent a year disagreeing about whether it was open, and the last dated post on its own Facebook page is December 2024. One customer, trying to use a forty-pound gift voucher, worked out what had happened before the internet did.
Sources 4
- In Cumbria: the new bar in what had been the Hourglass, with its owners and its interior
- Spider and Fly on Facebook
- Restaurant Guru: carried as temporarily closed, with the gift voucher review
- CARLISLE_PUBS_Ver_3.xls (Mike Tuer's pub database)
Open question
A date we can't pin down
When did the Spider & Fly at the foot of Stanwix actually close? It is definitely shut, but no announcement has turned up and the last dated trace of it trading is December 2024.
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.
Also lost on Scotland Road
2 other lost pubs stood within 250 m of here. See them on the map