Lost pub · Scotland Road
The Bird in Hand
- Gone
- Closed 1917, demolished for the widening of Scotland Road
- There now
- Demolished around 1924
- Address
- 1 Scotland Road, Stanwix
- Where exactly
- Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4000256986, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building has since been demolished.
A Stanwix pub, at the top of Stanwix Bank, on the road the corporation was already planning to widen. It was trading before 1819. Robert Hewitt held it in 1829, per Parson and White's directory, and very probably in 1811 too, when Jollie lists him as an innkeeper at Stanwix, and the 1851 census gives Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, 54 and born in Dover, Kent, as innkeeper. Its tenant Thomas H. Harris went bankrupt, and in March 1897 the licence passed temporarily from the Official Receiver to William Lees of the Golden Fleece on St Nicholas Street.
The Cumberland Evening News of 14 September 1916 reported the Bird in Hand Inn, Stanwix, as one of three houses the Control Board had taken over that week; other records give the acquisition as October 1916. It closed in 1917. The city's own minutes for 1918-19 record the site being bought that year for the widening of Scotland Road, and minutes for 1923-24 record tenders invited to pull the building down, which happened in 1924. A 1923 photograph, taken obliquely, is the only image of it known to survive.
The Cumberland News ran an illustrated piece on it on 26 December 1991, and Denis Perriam wrote it up for the paper in March 2008. The 1991 column places it on the extreme left of a photograph of a corner of old Stanwix, on the left travelling north, with a doorway and an upstairs window visible and two other properties making up the rest of the terrace to its right.
It says this terrace stood in front of where the row of shops stands at the top of Stanwix Bank, and that it all went in the early 1930s when the road was widened on the northern approach to the Eden Bridges, though the pub had ceased trading during the scheme's rationalisation in the First World War. By 1991 the triangular car park in front of Church Terrace took up the site, and the column asked for a photograph of the pub as seen from Church Street, looking west.
Sources 7
- carlisle-encyclopaedia.co.uk
- CARLISLE_PUBS_Ver_3.xls (Mike Tuer's pub database)
- Historic England, Countering the 'deadliest of foes': public houses of the Central Control Board and the State Management Scheme, 1916-73 (Clare Howard, Research Report 89-2018): Appendix C, gazetteer of scheme premises
- The Cumberland News, 26 December 1991, p. 4: 'Pubs of yesteryear', Bird in Hand, Stanwix (via newspapers.com)
- Cumberland Evening News, 14 September 1916, p. 2: 'Meeting of the Local Committee' (via British Newspaper Archive)
- Jollie's Cumberland Guide & Directory (Carlisle: F. Jollie & Sons, 1811), Carlisle directory, pp. i-xxii: Stanwix: Hewitt Robert, innkeeper (Google Books scan of the Bodleian copy)
- Carlisle Patriot, 19 March 1897, p. 3: County Police Court, transfer of the Bird in Hand, Stanwix (via British Newspaper Archive)
Open question
A date we can't pin down
When was the Bird in Hand at Stanwix pulled down? This site has the demolition tendered in 1923-24 and done in 1924 for the widening of Scotland Road, but the Cumberland News of 26 December 1991 says the whole terrace went in the early 1930s when the approach to the Eden Bridges was widened.
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
3 other lost pubs stood within 250 m of here. See them on the map
Still serving, near where it stood
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120 maway
-
120 maway
-
200 maway
-
360 maway