CarlislePubs 🛍️ Lost pubs shopShop: T-shirts, hoodies, mugs & a jigsaw

Lost pub · Scotch Street

The Old Bush Inn

Gone 1917

Gone
Closed 1917
There now
The site of a late twentieth-century shopping centre
Address
31 Scotch Street (3 Old Bush Lane in the directories)
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4013556011, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building has since been demolished.

At 31 Scotch Street from 1811 to 1917: a full century's trading, ended in the same wave of State Management closures that took most of the street's other pubs. Kelly's directories give its address as 3 Old Bush Lane, behind the Scotch Street frontage; the Cumberland News of 5 April 1991 places it in Old Bush Lane, off Scotch Street, and Rawlinson's 1850 plan for the General Board of Health names Old Bush Lane as the next lane south of Globe Lane on the east side of the street. Not the Bush Hotel on English Street, which the state acquired in 1916 and which stopped being a pub in 1918 or 1919, and whose building is the NatWest bank now, nor the Bush Vaults on Blackfriars Street, the rebuilt White Horse Inn.

Its best-known lines are older than any of its landlords. In its account of Corby Castle, Parson and White's directory of 1829 prints 'the following lines, written by David Hume, about 1750, upon a pane of glass at the Old Bush Inn, at Carlisle', sent to Mr Howard of Corby by Sir Walter Scott: "Here chicks, in eggs for breakfast, sprawl; / Here godless boys, God's glories squall; / While Scotsmen's heads adorn the wall, / But Corby's walks atone for all."

The heads were the Jacobites' heads, set on the city gates after 1746, and the godless boys presumably the cathedral choristers. Samuel Jefferson's History and Antiquities of Carlisle (1838) prints the same lines, 'written with a diamond on a pane of glass in the old Bush inn', and says Scott believed them to be the only verse Hume ever attempted. The attribution to Hume is the directory's, and some versions put the window simply at the Bush; but in 1750 the Bush itself still stood on Scotch Street, not moving to English Street until 1783, so either way the pane was in a Scotch Street house.

James Foster, a printer, took the Old Bush in June 1852, offering steaks and chops at the shortest notice, the London Times and Bell's Life, and a large room for society meetings, auctions, select balls and quadrille parties. He kept his printing works and circulating library going across the street in Plume of Feathers Court, by the Plume of Feathers, and in 1861 Mrs J. Foster of the Old Bush gave up the printing and sold the presses. J. Keating signed the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867 for the Old Bush, and Mr Bell of the Old Bush sat on St Mary's committee of the publicans' subscription for the poor in December 1878.

Peter Peascod had come from the Golden Fleece on St Nicholas Street by 1887, when he asked to have singing in his large room ('The Mayor: A free and easy.' Laughter) and was put off for want of notice under the city's new bye-laws. He was still there, Carlisle-born, in 1891. In September 1892 the licence passed from Mrs Mary Peascod to John Graham, and in January 1894 Mary Peascod, 'formerly of the Old Bush Inn', took over the Light Horseman in Rickergate. That September the licence passed from Jane Graham to Sanderson Carey of Maryport, and Tom Tweddle, also Carlisle-born, had it by 1901.

It was a Maryport Brewery house when the scheme acquired it in October 1916, and it closed in 1917; a Cumberland News column of July 1992, which has it from 1829 to the First World War, thinks the scheme closed it. Its site is now under a late twentieth-century shopping centre.

Sources 16

Also lost on Scotch Street

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

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs