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Lost pub · Castle Street

The Bird in Hand

Gone 1916

Gone
Closed by the scheme on 12 July 1916
There now
Not established. Nobody is certain which doorway was the pub
Address
5-7 Castle Street
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY3981956095, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building has since been demolished.

At 5 Castle Street, trading before 1802. A Cumberland News column of 17 May 1991, an illustrated retrospective, puts it at the northern end of the street, on the right-hand side looking towards the castle, near the corner with Finkle Street, with the entrance to Bird in Hand Lane just to its right. It appears on the 1865 Ordnance Survey 50-inch map, and the earliest colourful record of it is a Carlisle Journal account from July 1817 of a footrace wagered to start 'from the Bird in Hand in Castle Street.'

John Dunn is named in the 1829 directory, and very probably had it already in 1811, when Jollie lists him as an innkeeper in Castle Street. The 1861 census gives Mary Thompson, 49 and born at Aikton, as innkeeper. An H. Walker signed the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867 for a Bird in Hand, but with a second at Stanwix it is not clear which. It changed hands at auction in February 1877, at the Lion and Lamb: the Bird in Hand, then occupied by Thomas Elsworth, sold with 7 Castle Street, eight houses behind it in Bird in Hand Lane, sixteen more and a weaving shop. Bidding reached £3,700 before the lot was split and then put together again, and it went for £3,780 to Gilbert Hill, builder, for Thomas Doughall of the Hare and Hound Inn, Botchergate.

John Robinson, a 32-year-old cooper born in Ireland, is recorded there in 1891. George Lewthwaite, a hatter from Denton Street, took over the inn in September 1895 and appears to have stayed until it closed; he is the innkeeper of the 1901 census, 38 and Carlisle-born. At the brewster sessions of September 1898 its renewal was adjourned with four others for the Chief Constable to see that defects in construction and sanitary arrangements had been made good. The only known photograph dates from 1902, taken about the turn of the century by the column's reckoning, and possibly shows Lewthwaite.

It was an Iredale's house by the end, and it was closed on 12 July 1916, in the scheme's first week; the Cumberland News of 4 November 1916 lists it among the Carlisle licensed houses the Board had closed by 1 November. The column gives its directories as 1829 to 1914 and calls it a casualty of the scheme's wartime takeover and of redevelopment. Even with the photograph in hand the exact spot is disputed: the blocked doorway beside the archway and the ground floor windows next to it are the best guess. The building has been altered so heavily since, possibly losing a storey, that the guess is all there is.

Sources 11

Location from britishlistedbuildings.co.uk. The pin marks the site.

Also lost on Castle Street

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