Lost pub · Fisher Street

The Regency

Gone about 2017

Gone: Closed January 2017
There now: The building later held Abstrakt, which itself closed in 2024
Address: 6-8 Fisher Street

Carlisle's LGBT nightclub, and the only one the city has had that came with an information centre above it. It began with an announcement in May 2013 that Carlisle was to get its first lesbian and gay headquarters, in what the paper described as the former Front Page and Melting Pot building on Fisher Street. Glenn Anderson, who had run Outrageous on English Street, set it up with Pam Eland of Pride in North Cumbria.

Charities took offices in the building, the police had a base there for reporting hate crime, and a community cafe called Sticky Bits opened on the floor above, serving everyone from ten in the morning until eight at night and later on Saturdays to feed the people coming out of the club. The nightclub in the basement was to be called Fairytales. What opened was the Regency, running from eight or nine in the evening until four in the morning, Wednesday through Sunday, with cabaret and drag acts and a door policy that welcomed everybody.

The premises licence was granted in March 2013. LGBThq outgrew the building and moved: their own announcement records that Fisher Street shut on Saturday 28 January 2017 and the centre relaunched at 21 Victoria Place at the end of March. The licence was surrendered with effect from 1 August 2017, though the gaming machine notification was left uncancelled until October 2018, which is the sort of loose end that keeps a closed venue looking open in the registers. The premises came back as Abstrakt in March 2018 and went quiet again in 2024.

Sources

Also lost on Fisher Street

All the lost pubs