Lost pub · Pennine Way
The Inglewood Forest Inn
- Built
- Opened October 1953, built by Laing
- Gone
- Closed 2007; demolition date disputed
- There now
- Housing
Named for the old Forest of Inglewood, said to have once run all the way from Carlisle to Penrith. A post-war state inn rather than a Redfern one. It opened in October 1953, built by Laing, the same contractor the scheme used for the Royal Scot seven years later. Historic England's record describes farmhouse brown facing bricks and French windows opening onto a terrace, with a sunken bowling green behind brick retaining walls and flower beds, so the scheme was still laying bowling greens more than twenty years after Redfern set the habit.
It shortened its name to the Inglewood before closing in 2007. There is a photograph: Laing photographed their own contracts, and the exterior seen from the south survives in the John Laing Photographic Collection at Historic England. The dates are a mess. Historic England give the opening as 31 October 1953 and CAMRA as 21 October. Historic England say it was demolished in 2007, CAMRA say 2008, and the State Management archive says 2010 -- though the local paper's own planning coverage sits closer to CAMRA's account: opposition to the pub's closure was still being reported in November 2007, and planning permission for 41 houses on the site wasn't granted until March 2008, which makes an outright 2007 demolition unlikely. It had already made the news once before, for a knife raid in August 1982, and it changed hands in 1998 as part of a £15 million package of Cumbrian pubs.