Lost pub · Currock Street

The Cumberland Wrestlers

1938 to about 2004

Built: Completed 3 October 1938 to Harry Redfern's design
Gone: Closed as a pub in 2004
There now: The building survives on the corner of Rome Street, boarded up
Address: 4 Currock Street

One of the last things Harry Redfern built, and the handover was managed to the day. The Goliah Inn on Crown Street closed permanently on 2 October 1938 and the Cumberland Wrestlers was completed on the 3rd. Shut the old drinking shop, open the improved house a few streets away, and lose no time about it. The name is for Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, the region's own grappling code, still fought at shows across the county every summer.

It may not have been a new name here either: the Brewery History Society's list of pubs belonging to Iredale's High Brewery includes a Cumberland Wrestlers on Currock Street, and Iredale's was one of the three Carlisle breweries the scheme shut in 1916. If so, Redfern's building took the name of an Iredale house and stood next door to the dead Iredale brewery, joined to it by an archway. The brewery itself went back further than either Currock Street building: John Haugh put up the first High Brewery on Water Street around 1794, went bankrupt in January 1816, and Joseph Iredale, born at Lorton, took the business on in the 1830s -- his son John G.

Iredale was still running it, from 5 Currock Road, as shown in the 1891 census. Brewing under the state stopped in 1917, and the Currock Street brewery building itself stood until a fire in November 1974 led to its demolition the following year. That list is worth knowing about for its own sake: Iredale's had twenty-three houses, and eighteen of them are in this directory or its lost pubs, from the Beehive on Warwick Road to the Stag at Low Crosby and both White Quays.

One brewery's estate, most of it still traceable a century after the state closed the brewery down. Critics have not been kind. One survey of every Redfern pub calls the exterior more conventionally Neo-Georgian than the Crown at Stanwix and quite plain by his usual standards. The inside was another matter: oak in the public bar as usual, and in the smoking rooms panelling in elm and Australian black bean.

A tropical Queensland hardwood, in a pub on a terraced street beside a coking plant. Because that is what stood around it. A contributor to the Closed Pubs project who grew up next door remembers the railway behind the brewery, a busy signal box on Rome Street, outside gents built into the sandstone walling on the way to the gas works, and a coking plant whose acrid fumes got into the houses and clung to the fabric of everything.

The same recollection is the best social record of any pub in this archive. A bedroom built over the brewery archway. Big wooden yard gates. The pub laid out the old way: a men's public bar with sawdust and spittoons, a snug, a lounge, a function room with a piano, an off-licence. From the early fifties a large, homely Aunty Maude ran it, hair in a turban, with a snappy spaniel called Molly. The neighbours had no hot water unless the fire was lit, and were allowed to fetch bucketfuls from the pub.

In the early sixties came cigar-smoking Robert in a suit and glamorous, bouffanted Nellie, and the Horseman's from the corner shop led the singing at weekends into the early seventies. Then juke boxes, then scampi and chips in a basket. Then the terraces came down row by row, the Metal Box factory shut, and there was nowhere to park. It stopped being a pub in 2004, though CAMRA say 2007. It was a carpet shop, then a fireplace centre, and it is boarded up now.

Redfern's work outliving its use is not unusual here: the Black Lion at Durdar is a Turkish restaurant and still his building. The Redfern building was in fact the third house to carry the name. The original stood on Water Street and is in local directories from 1848; it was demolished in the 1870s to make way for the station extension, and its licence transferred to a first building on Currock Street, put up around 1875.

Butterworth Ivison, 63, is recorded as "publican" of that earlier Currock Street building in the 1891 census. The Carlisle Journal covered the opening of Redfern's replacement, illustrated, on 30 September 1938. Later licensees included a landlord remembered only as "Bonzo Burns," photographed with the pub's football team in 1969, and Harry Crellin, who retired in March 2000 after fourteen years at the Wrestlers.

Cumberland News report of 21 April 2006 records Ian Jardine buying the pub with the intention of turning it into a house -- later than the pub's usual 2004 closing date, suggesting it may have reopened briefly, or gone on trading past 2004, before that 2006 sale; the two accounts have not been reconciled here. A separate, unexplained entry for a "Cumberland Wrestlers, Drovers Lane," in the Carlisle directory for 1870 only, may be a directory error for one of the two earlier houses above, or a genuinely separate early pub -- it is flagged as uncertain rather than treated as a fourth confirmed site.

Sources

Also lost on Currock Street

The Oddfellows Arms

All the lost pubs