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Lost pub · Denton Holme

The Prince of Wales

Gone about 2004

Built
On the first edition Ordnance Survey sheet of 1865
Gone
Closed about 2004, burnt on Christmas Eve 2008, demolished 2009
There now
An empty site, sold at auction for £275,000
Address
104 Denton Street
Where exactly
From the Ordnance Survey grid reference for the inn, NY 3974 5503.

It burnt on Christmas Eve, and it did not matter, which is the saddest thing about it. The Prince of Wales Hotel is on the first edition Ordnance Survey sheet of 1865, so it was standing on Denton Street by then, and it is in the records from 1866. Joseph Fernley of the Prince of Wales Hotel sat on the Caldewgate committee of the publicans' subscription for the poor in December 1878. It has a claim on the city's football history too: Carlisle Association Football Club held its third annual meeting here in September 1881, which is the evidence usually cited for the club's own founding in 1878.

In December 1890 its licence passed from John Robert Dalton to Mrs Ellen Hallsworth. In September 1897 the Chief Constable reported its bar and smoke room being enlarged; it was then the only fully licensed house for Denton Holme's four thousand people, and when the Denton Inn applied for a full licence that month, its witnesses said the Prince of Wales was sometimes so full that even in cases of illness it was impossible to get served with spirits in a reasonable time. John Reay, who also had the Milbourne Arms in 1894, kept it from then until at least 1914, at 104 Denton Street. A photograph of the pub taken in 1902 is published in Carlisle: the Archive Photographs at page 121.

It was a Carlisle New Brewery house when the State Management Scheme acquired it in August 1916, and appears as number 41 on the Brewery History Society's 1920 roll. In November 1916 the Board chose it as one of the seventeen houses in Carlisle where spirits could still be bought to take away; the 'off' sale of spirits was to be allowed nowhere else in the city. Closure was recommended in 1961, but the scheme gave it a new servery, new lavatories and a bigger off-sales department instead, and sold it to John Smith's on 8 May 1973.

George Downs, who managed it for about eleven years until that sale, remembered it as 'about the busiest pub in the town'. A former miner from Lambley Colliery, he joined the scheme in 1957 and ran the Crown on Botchergate for two years first, on £11 5s a week with free rent, heat and light. A pint was 10d in 1962; the customers came from Courtaulds and Penguin; one Christmas Eve the takings reached £1,000; an organist played in the smoke room at weekends; and people queued an hour for Sunday opening. 'The best thing about the scheme was the beer and the prices.'

It closed around 2004 and stood empty for four years; the Cumberland News of 30 June 2006 called the building empty. On Christmas Eve 2008 a fire, believed to be arson, destroyed the roof. Nobody was hurt, and the building was already scheduled for demolition, so the fire changed nothing except the date. It came down in 2009. The site was later sold at auction for £275,000, catalogued simply as the former Prince of Wales site. That is the whole of its afterlife: a lot number and a price.

Of the four hundred or so buildings the scheme owned, Historic England count 333 still standing. This is one of the ones that did not make it, and Denton Holme has lost a good deal beside it: the Denton Inn a few doors up, closed in 1927 after adverse police reports, the Nelson Bridge Inn, and the Cumberland Wrestlers round the corner on Currock Street, which is still there but is not a pub. Between the 1865 map, the 1902 photograph and Steven Davidson's Carlisle Breweries and Public Houses 1894-1916, which covers it at page 50, the building is better recorded than most of what is left standing.

Sold to John Smith's as part of Group 3, handed over on 8 May 1973. Who bought the rest

Photograph

Black and white photograph of the side of a stone and rendered corner building with faint painted lettering beginning The P high on the wall, a hedge and a lamp post in front and a Give Way sign at the corner
The Prince of Wales on the corner of Northumberland Street and Denton Street in August 1974 Cumbria Image Bank, image ct08723, used with permission
Old photograph of a two-storey brick corner pub behind iron railings, with a tall gas lamp on the pavement, two women in white aprons and a man in a waistcoat by the door and two small children sitting on the kerb
The Prince of Wales Inn, Denton Street, around 1900 Cumbria Image Bank, image ct01665, used with permission

Sources 15

Location from lakesguides.co.uk. The pin marks the site.

Also lost in Denton Holme

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

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs