Lost pub · Victoria Viaduct
The Central Hotel
- Built
- 1880 or 1881, by Daniel Birkett
- Gone
- Closed 2003 or 2004, demolished 2020
- There now
- Cleared. A 104-bedroom Premier Inn was approved for the site in February 2026
Designed by the Carlisle architect Daniel Birkett, who also drew the 1874 extension on the Turf. It opened as the Grand Central, became the Central Hotel and ended as the Central Plaza. The state took it in October 1916 and held it until 1973. Grade II listed in 1994, it closed about a decade later, though sources put that at either 2003 or 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. 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, a date that fits neatly with the hotel opening the following year. It opened on 2 July 1881 as the Great Central Hotel, built for a Mr Westmorland to the design of the Carlisle architect Mr Birkett, and Westmorland 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. 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. City minutes for 1903-04 record a "Great Central Assembly Hall" attached to it. It did war work too: 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.