The Bowling Green Hotel

Built

First in the local directory for 1837

Gone

Sold out of the scheme about 1971

There now

A probation and bail hostel

Where exactly

Placed on Lowther Street from the position of pubs still standing there. Somewhere on this street, not this doorway

One of the first four pubs the scheme took over in July 1916, alongside the Apple Tree, the Malt Shovel and the Board Inn, and number four on its 1920 roll. It first appears in the local directory for 1837 and is believed to stand on the site of an older pub, the Shakespeare Tavern, so this address has swallowed two pubs rather than one. It had a bowling green of its own until about 1971. The state took it on 24 July 1916 and sold it around 1971; it opened as a probation hostel in 1974 and still serves as one.

What was left of the bowling green was destroyed in a riot there in 1999. The building traces back further than its 1837 first mention in the directory: Denis Perriam, writing in Lowther Street (2022, p8), follows the site to a Spring Garden House recorded as early as 1713, renamed the Shakespeare Tavern by 1803 and rebuilt as the Bowling Green Hotel in 1885. Andrew Tait, a 61-year-old Scottish-born hotel keeper, is recorded running it in the 1891 census. After the green went, the Evening News and Star observed drily, in April 1971, that the pub had lost its bowling green but kept its name.

Sources

• geograph.org.uk
• Carlisle Encyclopaedia: directories, census and newspaper index
• D. Perriam, Lowther Street (2022), p8

Also lost on Lowther Street

• The Shakespeare Tavern
• Club Concrete
• The Gretna Tavern
• The Lanes Vaults

Still serving, near where it stood

• Bocata

  City Centre
  10 maway

• The Last Zebra

  City Centre
  20 maway

• Stanleys Bar & Cafe

  City Centre
  30 maway

• The Botanic Room

  City Centre
  30 maway