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Lost pub · Rickergate

The Malt Shovel

about 1750 to 2003

Built
Rebuilt 1928 by Harry Redfern; the original at least 18th century
Gone
Stopped being a pub in 2003
There now
Adriano's, an Italian restaurant
Address
2 Rickergate
Where exactly
The building survives on Rickergate as Adriano's. The only Rickergate pub building left.

The one that got away. Rickergate had at least fourteen pubs at the end of the nineteenth century, and this is the only building left standing from any of them. The original was an eighteenth-century inn at 2 Rickergate, with two coach houses and a good number of stables, handy for dealers and buyers at the cattle market on the Sands. Robert Burns stayed the night of 31 May 1787 in it. A Cumberland News column of 19 April 1991 adds that he rode into Carlisle on his grey mare Jenny Geddes to meet his friend John Mitchell, a printer, and that the mare strayed from the inn yard onto corporation grassland on the open space called the Bitts, was impounded by the Mayor and put in the corporation's pinfold, and was not returned until Burns paid a fine of half a crown.

Parson and White's directory of 1829 names Isabella Ritchie as its keeper, and the Cumberland News's 1933 list of the two streets' licensed houses has Mrs Letitia Gibson there in the 1860s. The corporation already owned it in 1862, when its Health Committee put the Malt Shovel out to the painters with the Town Hall, the Butcher Market and its other pub, the Half Moon in Fisher Street, which came down for the Covered Market in 1887. In 1991 a signboard on the outside wall listed the city tolls once paid at the toll booth that had stood just outside the old pub.

By the 1890s it was the last pub the city corporation owned. The council minutes of 1890-91 record the decision to sell it to raise money for the new Tullie House library and museum; an offer of £2,000 from a Mr D. Connon was accepted and then withdrawn, and the Workington Brewery stepped in at the same price in 1894. So a pub paid towards the public library at Tullie House, and the museum that now holds the city's records. Mrs Jane Little kept it in 1897 and J. McMullen in 1906, and in 1911 a Carlisle Journal writer was told that the Malt Shovel was the oldest inn in Carlisle as it then stood, 'visited and spoken of by Robert Burns'.

By 1916 it was a Maryport Brewery house, one of 13 licensed premises in Rickergate by the 1991 column's count. The state took it on 24 July 1916; in 1919 the Board's valuer offered the brewery £2,900 for the old house, and the brewery refused. The scheme pulled the old building down on 27 February 1927, removing the tenant, Mrs Matthews, for the rebuilding, and Redfern's replacement was finished by John Laing and Sons on 4 August 1928, when she was reinstated. R. C. Bell's obituary in 1941 lists the Malt Shovel among the State taverns his firm, J & R Bell, built, so both firms may have worked on it.

Round a central servery sat a men-only public bar off Rickergate with a billiards room, a parlour, and a big glass-roofed winter garden for men and women, the only winter garden in any Redfern pub and really a grand name for the mixed smoking room. The scheme's annual report for 1929 says the winter garden and billiard room were 'for the benefit of the public bar customers'. The counter was kept small to stop people standing at it, with removable panels to lengthen it on market days. Pies and sandwiches only, and no off-sales, which went to the nearby Fox and Hounds. The coach houses had gone: behind were stables for eight horses, a garage for five cars and a market room for farmers.

Inside was African mahogany, scarlet drapes, and 13 coloured glass windows showing the making of malt, the stages of brewing from sowing the barley to the finished drink. It had a wireless in the public rooms, a novelty in 1928, and its sign was by James Henry Sexton, the artist behind the Apple Tree's. Opening the new house let the neighbouring Golden Fleece close and be sold.

It went to Greenall Whitley on 3 April 1973, or 2 April by one record, and a big facelift in 1974 made it one of the city's best-known 'fun' pubs. It has since been the Brew House; a nightclub, Hoppers, was added to it by February 1998. Then came Robbies and, from a May 2004 relaunch under chef and owner Franco Bertoletti, Ristoranto Adriano: Adriano's, which is still there. It flooded in 2015 along with everything else down there, and in November 2016 Historic England's survey found the restaurant still shut for refurbishment after it; by then none of the interior survived, but the stable and garage ranges round the back yard still did. The restaurant shut in September 2022 after seventeen years, blaming energy costs and staffing, and reopened under a new team in 2024.

Sold to Greenall Whitley as part of Group 2, handed over on 3 April 1973. Who bought the rest

Photograph

Old photograph of a plain two-storey rendered inn with The Malt Shovel lettered across the front, a boarded-up doorway and window in the middle, a Rickergate street sign on the lower building to the left and a man standing on the pavement
The Malt Shovel, Rickergate, around 1927 Cumbria Image Bank, image ct01151, used with permission

Sources 16

Location from geograph.org.uk. The pin marks the site.

Also lost on Rickergate

33 other lost pubs stood within 250 m of here. See them on the map

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs