Lost pub · Holme Head

The Bay

2004 to 2012

Built: Opened as a pub in 2004
Gone: Closed 2012
There now: A children's activity centre

Not built as a pub at all. It was a house belonging to Ferguson Brothers' textile mill at Holme Head, described in one account as the works manager's, though that needs care: Holme Head House, a few yards away, is separately listed as the manager's house for the same factory and is offices now. A works the size of Ferguson's may well have housed more than one manager. The firm the firm that set up here in 1828 to use the Caldew for power and dominated Denton Holme until it closed in 1991 with two hundred redundancies.

The name is not about horses or an inlet. A bay in this sense is the weir built across the river to regulate the flow into the mill race, and the pub was named after the thing it stood beside. The Little Caldew, the mill race itself, still runs through Denton Holme and under it. It had a short life as a pub after the mill went and became a children's activity centre in 2012. So the building has outlasted the industry that put it up, the family that ran it and the trade it briefly carried on.

One more Ferguson building stands nearby and it is the pub's opposite number: the former Holme Head Coffee Tavern and Reading Room, Grade II listed, a non-alcoholic coffee tavern and reading room designed by George Dale Oliver and opened in January 1882 for the mill's own workers, with a grocery shop next door whose grocer doubled as custodian. A dining hall replaced the reading room in 1912, though the room itself was still in use as late as 1949 -- a Victorian temperance venue offering the sociability of a pub with the drink taken out.

The mill built somewhere to drink and somewhere not to, a few hundred yards apart. It reopened as a pub in 2004: the Cumberland News reported it granted a public entertainment licence that September. Ron Wood sold it on to Scottish & Newcastle in April 2006, Beth Martin took over as licensee in March 2008, and it was up for sale again by January 2010. By April 2011 it stood empty and vandalised, before becoming the children's activity centre the following year.

Sources

All the lost pubs