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Lost pub · English Street

The Royal Hotel

Gone 1874

Gone
Demolished 1874
There now
Bank Street
Address
19 English Street
Where exactly
On the south side of what is now Bank Street, at its English Street end. The pin is approximate.

A hotel and posting house on English Street, running back to Lowther Street. The Cumberland News of 21 June 1991 says it began as the private town house of a Miss Mounsey and was probably bought in the 1830s by Mr Croall, an Edinburgh mail coach contractor. At that time coaching in Carlisle was run by William Barton, with his office at the Bush, and a Mr Teather, at the Coffee House on the site of the Crown and Mitre, and Croall opened the Royal to compete with them on equal terms. It was trading by 1840, and in the directories between 1844 and 1858, with Thomas Elsworth as hotelkeeper from 1847.

As the railways ate into the trade the Royal was put up for sale in May 1845, described as one of the best hotels in the North of England, commodious and fitted with every modern convenience, with an extensive business from the mail and stage coaches that arrived and left daily. It had a large yard with stabling for 30 horses, lock-ups, coach houses, harness rooms, hay lofts and a large granary, carriage entrances from both Lowther Street and English Street, and at the Lowther Street entrance a coach office with a tap room behind. The rent of the property was £321.

Mrs Isabella Nicholson, who already owned the White Hart next door, bought it in 1855, and on 5 April that year the Carlisle Patriot reported an opening dinner at the Royal given by her friends to wish her success; she advertised that the two houses were now under her sole management. By 1861 she was styling herself innkeeper of the White Hart and Royal Hotel, the two having been knocked together. The column says she ran them until about 1858 and that the last licensee named in the directories was Joshua Hodgson, in 1873; one record has the Royal's premises taken by the Cumberland Union Bank.

Bank Street was then still a private way with a dwarf wall and iron railings dividing it from the houses in White Hart Lane. When its south side was built up in the 1870s the two hotels disappeared, both going in 1874, and the Carlisle and Cumberland Bank, later Martin's Bank and by 1991 Barclays, was built on the site. No photograph of either survives, only a drawing.

Photograph

Engraving of a three-storey hotel lettered Royal Hotel with a decorated parapet and a pillared entrance, a mail coach and a gig with horses in the street in front, and an engineer's premises next door advertising the Royal Mail and General Coach Establishment
The Royal Hotel, English Street, from an engraving Cumbria Image Bank, image ct47414, used with permission

Sources 3

Also lost on English Street

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Still serving, near where it stood

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