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Lost pub · English Street

The Bush Hotel

1686 to 1918

Built
Rebuilt 1878 to a design by C.J. Ferguson; the inn itself is recorded from 1686
Gone
Ceased as a pub 1918-19; the building survives
There now
The NatWest bank on English Street, the building it moved into in 1877
Address
45-46 English Street
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4013555739, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: bank (Natwest).

One of the oldest inn names in Carlisle, with a long and well-documented run of landlords. A Simon Tate of the Bush Inn appears in 1686, and Bishop Nicolson's diaries mention a Bush in the 1690s. The Bush stood on Scotch Street until 1783, and Hutchinson's History of Cumberland, printed in Carlisle in 1794, catches two moments there. Until an assembly room was built around 1759, balls were held in a room at the castle, 'and when any gave a ball it was chiefly at the Bush Inn'. And in July 1728 Richard Goodman, keeper of Carlisle Gaol, sent the antiquary Roger Gale a copper crescent 'found in digging a cellar opposite to the Bush-Inn', about nine feet down, which he took to be a symbol of Isis.

David Hume's lines on a window pane of 'the Old Bush Inn', about 1750, belong to the Scotch Street years too, and are given on the page for the Old Bush Inn. Dr Johnson and Boswell stayed at the Bush in 1773, which on that date would be the Scotch Street house.

In 1783 it moved to English Street and became the city's principal coaching inn. A Cumberland News column of 5 April 1991 places the old inn where English Street now meets the Viaduct, with an archway through the building giving access to Old Bush Brow, the road that ran down the side of the city jail. James Fairburn had it in the 1794 directory, and Hutchinson names it with the Crown and Mitre as 'the houses the mail coaches put up at'. In 1798, before the parish had a building of its own, Carlisle's Catholic congregation worshipped in a room in Fairbairn Buildings on West Walls, provided by a Mr Fairbairn of this hotel.

The keepers run in an almost unbroken line for more than a century. John Fletcher was innkeeper by 1803 and handed over to Thomas Wilson in May 1810. Jollie's directory of 1811 has Wilson in place and notes that the mail and other coaches depart from here, which is the pub's whole significance in one line. Wilson was still there in 1821, and Ralph Holmes, who had kept the King's Arms in 1811, had it from 1822 to 1829.

In 1829 Parson and White list the coaches that left 'from the Bush and Coffee House Inns, alternately', the Coffee House being the Crown and Mitre: the Royal Mail to London by way of Leeds, the mails to Manchester and Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Portpatrick and Newcastle, the Express to London by York, the New Times to Manchester, the Royal Sailor to Whitehaven, the Sir Walter Scott to Edinburgh by Hawick and Selkirk, and the Independent to Glasgow. The city's winter assemblies were held at the same two houses.

At one time Carlisle's inns were the meeting places of the political parties, and for about a century from the later eighteenth century the Bush was known as the yellow house, or the Lowther house, becoming a blue house about 1861. That had its price: a R. Holmes of the Bush, presumably the same man or a relative, wrote to Lord Lowther on 17 October 1831 asking for financial help after the Bush was damaged during that year's election, citing an earlier case in which the Coffee House's own windows had been broken.

Much of the city's social life revolved around it: suppers for bachelors, the Carlisle Whist Club, balls and banquets, a dinner on 12 March 1819 for the opening of the Carlisle Canal, another in June 1838 for the opening of the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway, the Grand Jury's dinners after the annual assizes and the corporation's own.

In January 1835 a dinner at Whitehaven heard a note from Mr Jackson, landlord of the Black Lion there, saying that he had lately taken the Bush. Benjamin Breach is in the 1851 census. According to J. Walter Brown's Round Carlisle Cross, two wooden figures of Grenadiers of the 2nd Regiment of Foot, Kirke's Lambs, shown by the lambs on their caps, were a feature of the Bush, relics of the garrison that held Carlisle after the 1745 rebellion. A landlord named Breach took them to the County Hotel when he moved there, and the 1991 column wondered where they are now.

One more thing happened here, and it is a strange one. In March 1859 a large box arrived at the Bush addressed to a Mrs Louden. Nobody came for it. It sat at the hotel for close on a year, and when it was finally opened in February 1860 it held a small coffin, and in the coffin the body of a child. The investigation that followed reached Newcastle, Hartlepool, Glasgow, Greenock and New Zealand. It is the subject of an episode of the Carlisle Times & Crimes podcast, Louden's Box: The Carlisle Coffin Mystery.

Then the viaduct took it. In 1860 the Bush stood where the Viaduct now joins English Street, opposite Devonshire Street. When the viaduct was built between 1875 and 1877 a hole was knocked through English Street to reach it, and the old inn was in the way. Joseph Wootton took it on in 1876, the year the old inn closed: it shut in October and was pulled down to open out the roadway. An account of the viaduct's cost in August 1877 put 'Bush and adjoining property' at £14,750; by then the Corporation had sold the Bush Hotel site to Messrs Little and Ballantyne for £2,800 and the Bush stables site to Messrs Carr for £6,000.

The Bush moved into a new building on the other side of the gap, facing a different way. It carries the date 1877 high on the corner of English Street, was described in the Carlisle Journal of 24 May 1878, and is usually credited to C. J. Ferguson. The inn took the upper floors, with the seedsmen Little and Ballantyne on the ground floor. Two photographs survive, one taken in 1876, immediately before the old inn was demolished, and one from the late 1890s showing its replacement, so both Bushes can be seen.

The new Bush lasted forty years. A. C. Kirkpatrick was managing in 1882, a Mr T. Walsh of the Bush Hotel was at the Licensed Victuallers' dinner of January 1882, and in 1901 Robert Clarke was managing for the proprietor Johnson Carr. By the end it was a Maryport Brewery house. The State Management Scheme acquired it in October 1916; the Board's 1919 memo on compensation says it bought the business only, not the building, and closed the hotel. The pub ended in 1918 or 1919, or in 1916-17 by Historic England's gazetteer, and the building became a bank in July 1922. By 1966 it was the National Provincial Bank Chambers, and it is still there: the NatWest bank on English Street.

Two accounts of its end are in circulation and both are true, of different buildings: the Bush of 1783 to 1877 stood on ground that was cleared for the viaduct, and the Bush of 1877 onwards became the bank. The 1930 demolition sometimes attached to the Bush took the City Arms at 41-42, a few doors along, for which Woolworths was built in 1932.

Photograph

Colour photograph of a four-storey red sandstone corner building with a curved corner bay, Dutch gables and dormers in a slate roof, and National Westminster Bank signs over the ground floor, with shoppers on the pavement
The building on English Street the Bush Hotel moved into in 1877, now the NatWest bank Cumbria Image Bank, image ct47462, used with permission

Sources 17

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