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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
Denton Street, CA2 5EN
Where exactly
From the Ordnance Survey grid reference for the inn, NY39745503. Not a survey

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. It was taken into the State Management Scheme and appears as number 41 on the Brewery History Society's 1920 roll. 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.

It closed around 2004. It then stood empty for four years. On Christmas Eve 2008 a fire, believed to be arson, destroyed the roof. The building was empty, nobody was hurt, and it 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. Two things do survive it.

There is a photograph of the pub taken in 1902, published in Carlisle: the Archive Photographs at page 121. And Steven Davidson covers it at page 50 of Carlisle Breweries and Public Houses 1894-1916. Between the map, the photograph and the book, the building is better recorded than most of what is left standing.

Sources

Location from lakesguides.co.uk. That's the building standing over it, not the exact doorway.

Also lost on Denton Holme

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs