CarlislePubs 🛍️ Lost pubs shopShop: T-shirts, hoodies, mugs & a jigsaw

Lost pub · London Road

The Samson Inn

1891 to 1917

Built
1891 (rebuilt; an earlier beerhouse on the site, the Steam Engine, is recorded from 1837)
Gone
Closed 1917
There now
A fast food outlet
Address
55 London Road (113 after about 1910)
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4095855049, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: commercial.

Known earlier as the Steam Engine, a beerhouse at Halfway Houses on London Road recorded from 1837, before it took the Samson name around 1850. The name itself was borrowed from an early locomotive that ran on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway. It was 55 London Road until about 1910 and 113 after, and shares the street with the Railway Inn, which went in 2005, and the St Nicholas Arms. In May 1868 the licence passed from Elizabeth Graham to Joseph Graham.

It was rebuilt in 1891, and the Chief Constable's report that September records the work: the house was formed into a bar room, and what had been a passage from the street to the back was taken into the premises. Edmund Blair had managed it for someone else before taking it on his own account on 2 February 1896, with £500 borrowed from his brother-in-law; he reckoned the takings at £70 or £75 a week.

At the 1901 licensing sessions the Chief Constable named it, with several other pubs, in his annual report: in the preceding year ten children under 13 had been seen collecting liquor there, and in view of the new Act due on 1 January 1902 he suggested caution over supplying liquor to children. Blair, who kept it in 1897 and 1901, left on 2 February 1901 for the new Linton Holme, where he went bankrupt within six months. R. R. Riddell had it in 1906.

It was an Iredale's house when the scheme acquired it in August 1916. It closed in 1917 by Historic England's gazetteer, which has the scheme acquiring it without converting it; one record gives 1938.

The Cumberland News of 8 March 1991 ('Samson toppled') ran its picture and said that it closed in 1917 as far as the writer could ascertain, standing on the site later occupied by the K Motors car firm and then Budget Exhausts, or within that area below the old tram shed on the east side of London Road. A local historian then told the column on 15 March that the building looked to be still standing, though much altered: the one immediately south of the Budget Exhaust Centre, with a grocery shop on the ground floor and four first-floor windows that seemed to mark it as the Samson. The building is still standing and is a takeaway now, which is the fate of a good many London Road frontages.

Photograph

Old photograph of a two-storey rendered pub with arched ground-floor windows and doors, The Samson painted between the upper windows, a board for Birrell and Little, dealers and bonders, along the top and a man in a waistcoat in the doorway
The Samson Inn, London Road, around 1900 Cumbria Image Bank, image ct01107, used with permission

Sources 13

Also lost on London Road

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

Still serving, near where it stood

All the lost pubs