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Lost pub · Scotch Street

The Blue Bell Hotel

1776 to 1973

Built
First mentioned by name in 1776
Gone
Sold 1973, closed soon after
There now
Retail units on Scotch Street
Where exactly
From the listed buildings at 20-28 Scotch Street. Somewhere on this street, not this doorway

An eighteenth-century coaching inn, and neither of the other two Blue Bells: not the Rickergate one the state shut in 1917, and not the one still trading at Dalston. At least one lost-pubs index has this one and the Rickergate one the wrong way round. The state took it on 28 August 1916 and held it to the very end, selling it in 1973 to W Vasey & Sons for fifty thousand pounds. What changed hands was already more shop than pub: the sale took in the inn, an off-sales, and a shop unit let to Halfords.

It closed shortly afterwards and the building was cut up into the units there now, the brick front kept and the gable end rebuilt. It first appears by name in 1776, per a Denis Perriam history piece for the Cumberland News in July 2012, which names a Mrs Norman as the licensee. " John Snowden had it by 1821 and Nancy Irving from 1822. Later licensees include T. Loftus from 1842, Robert Mounsey in the 1847 directory, William Tiffin, 39 and from Dalston, in the 1861 census, and William Wilson, 61, by 1901; his daughter Mary Louise Wilson died at the Blue Bell Hotel in September 1912, aged 38.

The Evening News and Star reported a ghost story attached to the pub in January 1971 and ran the story "City pub closes" in April 1973. A fire gutted the building in 1976, leaving only the front wall standing, which is very likely why the brick front was kept when the site was cut up into the shop units there now.

Sources

Location from britishlistedbuildings.co.uk. Placed on the right street, not the exact spot.

Also lost on Scotch Street

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs