The Central Hotel

Built

1880 or 1881, by Daniel Birkett

Gone

Closed October 2004, demolished 2020

There now

The site has been cleared; a 104-bedroom Premier Inn was approved for it in February 2026

Where exactly

Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4006255704, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: hotel (Central Plaza Hotel).

Designed by the Carlisle architect Daniel Birkett, who also drew the 1874 extension on the Turf. It opened as the Great Central, became the Central Hotel and ended as the Central Plaza. Its bricks came from close by: a Carlisle Journal notice of 30 April 1880 records Charles and John Armstrong's Kingstown Brick Works supplying "common and ornamental bricks" for the building. It opened on 2 July 1881 as the Great Central Hotel, built for a Mr Westmorland, who owned it until his death in 1901. The Carlisle Journal covered the opening on 5 July 1881, and the Carlisle Patriot two days later put the scale of the place on record: 126 rooms, of which 76 were bedrooms.

In September 1886 a transfer of the Great Central's licence from Henry J. B. Lawrence to Seaton Ricks was put back three weeks for want of notice, and in September 1890 the licence passed from William Shepherd to Percy Granville Banton. The 1891 census gives Hannah Gregory, 47 and born in London, as hotel manageress, with eighteen live-in staff and six guests recorded that night. Jonathan Sumpton, who took the Albert on Botchergate in 1892, came to it with 'a nine years' character from the Central Hotel'. City minutes for 1903-04 record a "Great Central Assembly Hall" attached to it, and James Busby was its proprietor in 1906.

The state took it in October 1916: the Cumberland News of 21 October 1916 names the Great Central Hotel, Viaduct, among the houses taken over that week. That November it was lodging 140 Gretna men, and was already being eyed as a women's hostel, and a 1917 account of wartime hostels for women munitions workers notes that further accommodation for "girl workers" was shortly to be available in the Great Central Hotel and the Carlisle Central Conservative Club, both on the Viaduct, both commandeered by the authorities for the duration.

The scheme held it until 1973, and Historic England's gazetteer shows it spending on it steadily: improved in 1928-9, the billiards room turned into a dining room in 1953, refurbished in 1956, bathrooms put into ten of the bedrooms in 1963-4 and the bar redecorated in 1965. The gazetteer gives it two more names, the Dive and the Sportsman's Bar, and the scheme's jubilee supplement of October 1966 explains them: the Dive, the bar below the hotel and exclusively for men, had just been refitted with a modern counter and sporting photographs and renamed the Sportsman's Bar, alongside a new cocktail bar in the hotel itself.

Grade II listed in 1994, it closed in October 2004. A fire gutted several floors in July 2011, the year ownership reverted to the Crown Estate, and the city council cleared the site in 2020 once the building was declared structurally unsafe. Its western boundary is a stretch of the medieval wall that runs from the castle to the cathedral, and that is being kept and restored.

Sold in 1973 as “Central Hotel, the Viaduct” to Greenall Whitley for £220,000. Who bought the rest

Photograph

Also lost on Victoria Viaduct

• The Viaduct Hotel

54 other lost pubs stood within 250 m of here. See them on the map

Still serving, near where it stood

• West Walls Brewing Co.

  City Centre
  80 maway

• The Sportsman Inn

  City Centre
  120 maway

• Open Mind

  City Centre
  120 maway

• Tithe Barn

  City Centre
  130 maway