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Lost pub · Botchergate

The Crown

about 1808 to about 2021

Built
The present building dates from the 1860s; a pub here since at least 1822
Gone
Closed around February 2021; one record gives 24 May 2019
There now
Empty. The building was for sale in 2026 as part of the Crown Works site
Address
90 Botchergate
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4046855437, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: public house (Crown).

One of the older pub buildings left in Carlisle, and one of the emptiest. A pub has stood at 90 Botchergate, on the corner where Crown Street meets it, since about 1808, and Mary Robinson was landlady of the Crown Inn in 1820. Crown Street itself had a brief and forgotten moment. The Maryport and Carlisle Railway opened a terminus there on 30 December 1844 and closed it on 17 March 1849, when the trains were diverted to London Road, so for four years and three months the pub stood on the corner of a street with a railway station at the end of it. Its yard was a quoiting ground: in August 1855 Thomas Coats of the Golden Quoit beat John Rennie of Alva there in a match for £25 a side.

The building standing now went up in the 1860s, replacing that earlier pub on the same prominent corner. The 1861 census gives David Hall, 45 and born at Richmond, as 'hotel keeper and contractor'. His son, also David, went further than running the place: trading as D. Hall and Sons, he had a brewery fitted up behind the pub, going from 1869 until it was sold by auction in 1898, a small, short-lived fifth brewery alongside the city's better-known four. The 1891 census gives William Hall, 46 and born at Liverpool, in his father's role, Lowingham Hall kept it in 1897, the Hall family again, and David John White in 1906. S. Davidson's Carlisle Breweries and Public Houses covers the pub on pp59-60.

By 1916 the Crown was a Carlisle New Brewery house. The State Management Scheme acquired it that August, and in November the Board chose it as one of the seventeen houses in Carlisle where spirits could still be bought to take away; the 'off' sale of spirits was to be allowed nowhere else in the city. The scheme held it until it was wound up, and sold it to Scottish & Newcastle on 16 April 1973. When the local CAMRA branch was founded in February 1976 it was one of only two pubs in the city still selling real ale, with the Woolpack, by the branch's account because its manager, Jack Bell, insisted on it.

In later years it traded as the Crown Lounge. It closed in October 2009, and the Cumberland News reported on 19 May 2010 that it was set to reopen after a revamp. CAMRA record that 2010 refurbishment, after which it went in for sports television and live acts, and the licensing register puts a date on it: a gaming machine permit was issued to Crown Lounge Limited on 19 May 2010. The same permit was cancelled on 17 February 2021. Eleven years, and then the paperwork stops; one record gives the closing date as 24 May 2019. It has been a familiar derelict sight at that end of the street ever since.

In July 2026 it went on the market, though not as a pub. It was folded into the sale of the whole Crown Works site at a £1.2 million guide price: a six-storey former mill let to a woodworks, a fight club and a dance academy, a twenty-two space car park, and the empty pub on the corner. The particulars say the former pub may lend itself to other uses, subject to the necessary consents, which is estate agency for it will not be a pub again. The Goliah stood on Crown Street too and went in 1938; the Caledonian and the Cumberland are still trading a few hundred yards up.

Sold to Scottish & Newcastle as part of Group 1, handed over on 16 April 1973. Who bought the rest

Photograph

Old photograph of a large two-storey corner hotel with tall chimneys and arched signs reading Crown Hotel over the windows and the corner, and men and women in long white aprons standing along the pavement
The Crown, Botchergate Cumbria Image Bank, image ct04493, used with permission

Sources 15

Also lost on Botchergate

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Still serving, near where it stood

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