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Lost pub · St Albans Row

The Old Queens Head

Gone 1903

Gone
Licence ended April 1903
There now
The building stands, grade II listed; in commercial use in 2018
Address
12 St Albans Row
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4007155985, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: commercial.

At 12 St Albans Row, trading before 1785 and until 1902, when it drops out of the directories: well over a century. It was known at first simply as the Queens Head. The building survives, grade II listed and dated by Historic England's gazetteer to the early or middle eighteenth century.

Rawlinson's plan of 1850 for the General Board of Health shows the Queen's Head in the middle of the block between Fisher Street and Scotch Street, reached from St Alban's Row by a covered passage, with stables and market rooms beside it and the Plume of Feathers next door to the east. The Cumberland News of 1 November 1991 puts it behind the Town Hall, one of the older licensed houses and one that catered for the travelling public with stables, probably throughout most of the nineteenth century. Not the Old Queens Head on Church Street in Caldewgate.

The Cumberland News of 4 February 1922 suggests it is the Queen's Head Inn whose long room hosted the first meeting of the Carlisle Choral Society on 1 June 1824. The columnist reasoned that it was the one in St Alban's Row, known as the Old Queen's Head, so described in 1829 to tell it from two other Queen's Heads, both in Caldewgate. The report he found describes a modest affair: about a hundred people, a president, R. Lowry, a leader, Mr Hill, and about seventeen other singers, some of them boys, and the first music of Handel the city had heard in seventeen years; Robert Anderson wrote verses addressed to the society after hearing it.

Mr Hill, the cathedral organist, knew the inside of a public house. The Chapter minutes of June 1817 record him fined five guineas and threatened with dismissal 'for tippling at ale-houses and frequenting the cock-pit'.

Thomas Mason kept it in June 1849, when he was fined 20s for permitting disorderly conduct in the house at one o'clock on a Monday morning, his second offence. In June 1881 the licence passed temporarily from Mr Temple to George Hall. Francis C. Harker kept it in 1884 and 1894, and Sanderson Carey in 1901, the last keeper before the licence ended.

By about 1900 it had outlived its usefulness and fell below the accepted standard of sanitation. At the licensing sessions of August 1901 the police opposed renewal because it was in a very insanitary condition: it had only two public rooms, both dingy and badly ventilated and partly surrounded by stables of a most objectionable nature, with no proper ventilation and paved with cobbles. The justices did not renew at once but adjourned the matter to the September sessions, when they granted the licence for another year.

The 1991 column notes that it last appeared in the directories in 1902-03, so it seems to have been forced to close then. That fits: the Carlisle Journal's report of the adjourned licensing sessions of March 1903 lists it among six city licences that would cease after April that year. Historic England's gazetteer has the pub closing in 1918 instead, and found the building in commercial use in 2018.

Photograph

Engraved plan of a block of buildings in Carlisle with lanes, yards and red drain lines; a red circle round the words Queens Head in the middle of the block, with a covered passage running down to St Alban's Row, and a red label reading Queen's Head
The Queen's Head in the middle of the block, reached by a covered passage from St Alban's Row, on Robert Rawlinson's plan for the General Board of Health, 1850 Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark

Sources 12

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