Lost pub · Crown Street
The Goliah Hotel
- Built
- In local directories from 1855
- Gone
- 2 October 1938
- There now
- Unknown
A State Management pub on Crown Street, in Carlisle directories from 1855. It closed on 2 October 1938, the day before the Cumberland Wrestlers opened on Currock Street to replace it. Nobody has explained the spelling, and the paperwork does not help: the Brewery History Society's 1920 roll of scheme pubs spells it Goliath. There is at least a photograph of this one, a view of the pub in 1902 in Carlisle: The Archive Photographs.
One contemporary account of the scheme's improved pubs singles it out. Writing while the work was going on, it describes the Goliah in Crown Street as being in one of the poorest parts of the city, adapted for the supply of meals, and fitted with a cookshop for an outdoor trade in food. A state-run takeaway counter, in about 1917, in the district that needed it most. That is the scheme's food policy at its most practical, and it is more interesting than anything it did at the smart end of town. And the name, which looks biblical, is not. The Goliah was apparently called after a locomotive on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway.