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Lost pub · Botchergate

The Crown

1822 to about 2021

Built
The present building dates from the 1860s; a pub here since at least 1822
Gone
Closed around February 2021
There now
Empty. The building was for sale in 2026 as part of the Crown Works site
Address
90 Botchergate

One of the older pub buildings left in Carlisle, and one of the emptiest. There are records of a pub trading at 90 Botchergate from at least 1822, on the corner where Crown Street meets it. The building standing now went up in the 1860s, replacing that earlier pub on the same prominent corner. The State Management Scheme took it in 1916 with the rest, held it until the scheme was wound up, and sold it to Scottish & Newcastle in 1973.

In later years it traded as the Crown Lounge. CAMRA record a refurbishment in 2010 after which it went in for sports television and live acts, and the licensing register puts a date on that: 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. 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. 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. That is why it has moved from the directory to this archive.

It had been carried as temporarily closed on the strength of the State Management Story listing it as expected to reopen. A building sold off as part of a commercial investment lot, with its future described in terms of other uses, is not a pub waiting to reopen. 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.

For four years and three months this pub, already twenty years old, stood on the corner of a street with a railway station at the end of it. The Goliah stood on Crown Street too and went in 1938. The Caledonian and the Cumberland are still trading a few hundred yards up, and between them and this corner Botchergate has lost Mood, the Las Vegas Strip, Terminal, BrewDog, Buzz Bingo, the Earl Grey, Deakin's Vaults, the Albert and the Midland Railway Tavern.

The Carlisle Encyclopaedia's own account of a "Crown Inn/Hotel, Botchergate/Crown Street" is almost certainly this same building under its fuller trading name: it sits on the same corner of Crown Street, and its closure and reopening line up closely with this entry's own record. The Cumberland News reported on 19 May 2010 that the Crown was set to reopen after a revamp, having closed in October 2009 -- an earlier closure and reopening than the pub's final, permanent one around February 2021.

S. Davidson's Carlisle Breweries and Public Houses covers the pub on pp59-60, and Mary Robinson is named as landlady of the Crown Inn as early as 1820, per G. Topping's Memories of Carlisle, p134. The 1861 census gives David Hall, 45 and born at Richmond, as "hotel keeper and contractor," and the 1891 census gives William Hall, 46 and born at Liverpool, in the same role. David Hall's 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.

Sources

Also lost on Botchergate

All the lost pubs