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Lost pub · English Street

The Victoria Hotel

1850 to 1920

Built
Rebuilt in Arts and Crafts style, 1904-05
Gone
Taken over by the state in 1916, sold on to E. F. Fairbairn in 1920
There now
Citadel Chambers
Address
English Street, extending into Citadel Row
Where exactly
Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY4022155684, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: commercial.

Trading from 1850 by one record, and a late one to go: it went at its largest. The original Victoria was a three-storey hotel on the corner of English Street and Citadel Row, near the Courts. Citadel Row, incidentally, was once Cuckold's Row. Its first named keeper is Aaron Martin: Ward's North of England Directory for 1851 carries the hotel's advertisement that after eight years at the Angel Inn he had moved to the Victoria, which squares with his reopening the Angel in February 1843. He is still there as 'Marton' in Kelly's 1858 directory, and Richard Johnston follows in the 1861 census.

Mr Armstrong of the Victoria sat on the English Street committee of the publicans' subscription for the poor in December 1878, and in March 1881 Charles J. Armstrong of the Victoria bought the Union Hotel, Citadel Row, at auction for £2,530, to extend his business. The Victoria had already extended back into Citadel Row when it was sold in 1891. Margaret Little was hotel manageress that year, and Andrew Tait was in charge by an 1898 sale advertisement and still there, Scottish-born, in the 1901 census.

The Cumberland News of 7 February 1992 says the original hotel was demolished in 1904 and rebuilt with one more floor, giving the black and white timbered building that still stood in 1992. The work ran from 1904 to 1905, in an Arts and Crafts style (Oliver and Dodgshun's plans, approved in 1903, described it at the time as 'mock Tudor'), and pushed the hotel further into the Row again.

The State Management Scheme took the hotel over in 1916, and under the Board it stayed a meeting place and a regular sale room. The draw for the Border Union coursing meeting at Netherby, with the Earl of Lonsdale among the nominators for the Netherby Cup, was to be made at the Victoria Hotel in October 1917.

The Board sold its own surplus pubs there: fourteen city properties under Fred Telford's hammer on the evening of 30 April 1919, and its country houses at Longtown, Kingstown, Cotehill and Dalston under Walter Gibbings's three days later. On a single page of the Cumberland News in June 1919 four firms of auctioneers advertised six farm and estate sales in the hotel, among them the Carleton estate and Brunstock Farm. The 1992 column's last directory mention is 1914, from which it infers that the hotel closed after the takeover, but the sale notices show the Board using the building until 1919.

The scheme sold it on in 1920 to E. F. Fairbairn, who leased what is now called Citadel Chambers to Cumberland County Council. So the offices occupy a hotel that was rebuilt bigger only to be shut fifteen years later.

Photograph

Old photograph of a three-storey corner hotel with lettering across the front reading Taits late Strongs Victoria Hotel, a gas lamp on the pavement, a horse and cart at the kerb and more carriages further down the street
The Victoria Hotel, English Street, when it was Tait's, late Strong's Cumbria Image Bank, image ct47469, used with permission
Black and white photograph of a cobbled street with tram lines, a statue on a tall plinth in the middle, a tram bound for Denton Holme on the left, and on the right a half-timbered gabled building lettered Victoria Hotel above shop blinds reading British Shoe Co, beside a castellated stone building
English Street in the 1920s: the Victoria Hotel above the British Shoe Company on the right, the Lonsdale statue in the middle Sankey Family Photograph Collection, Cumbria Archives: English Street, Sankey 6580, BDB 86/1/1975 (border trimmed), CC BY-NC 4.0
Old photograph looking up a cobbled English Street past the Lonsdale statue, with horse-drawn carts, people on the pavements and rows of shops and hotels with lettered fronts on both sides
English Street in 1895, with the Victoria Hotel on the right of the Lonsdale statue Cumbria Image Bank, image ct01022, used with permission

Sources 10

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