Lost pub · Warwick Bridge

The George Inn

Gone 2008

Gone: Demolished 5 June 2008
There now: The site was taken for development and was in commercial use by 2018
Address: Warwick Bridge, Carlisle CA4 8RL
Where exactly: Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4766056868, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: commercial.

The village pub at Warwick Bridge. It started as a beerhouse and became the Cooperative Inn in 1876; in July 1916 the Cumberland News still listed it as the Co-operative Inn, Warwick Bridge. Warwick Bridge had two other pubs on the main road, the Warwick Arms and the Spinners, the Spinners trading from around 1822 to 1909.

It was a State Management house: number 18 on the scheme's roll of 1920, sitting between the Friars Tavern on Devonshire Street and the Globe on Bridge Street. The Cumberland News of 19 May 1917 lists the Cooperative Inn among five houses put under the Board's direct management in the previous month. On 23 March 1918 the paper records the Board's committee noting that the Cooperative Inn, 'which is being considerably improved, is to be renamed the George', and it was rebuilt that year.

The National Archives hold a file on it, HO 190/231, George Inn, Warwick Bridge, covering 1918 to 1937 and catalogued under buildings and land in the records of the Central Control Board's Carlisle office, so the state was still spending money on the place through the interwar years. Historic England's gazetteer has it altered and refurnished in 1933-4 and its reconstruction approved in 1970. Its sign was shown at the Inn Signs Exhibition at the Building Centre in London in 1936, alongside a dozen of Ernest Dinkel's.

The scheme sold it to Greenall Whitley on 24 May 1973. Its end was less dignified. By the middle 2000s it was a Punch house going through tenants at speed, closing and reopening. It closed on 28 December 2006; one reviewer in February 2007 announced it was reopening on 2 March, and another replied that it had closed down eight hours later. It did not survive long after that. It was demolished on 5 June 2008, and CAMRA, who last surveyed it in 2010, record it as permanently closed. It is a mile and a half from the Queen at Great Corby, which the same scheme ran and which is still serving.

Sold to Greenall Whitley as part of Group 4, handed over on 24 May 1973. Who bought the rest