Lost pub · Durdar Road
The White Ox
- Gone
- Closed 2007
- There now
- Not established
- Address
- 60 Durdar Road
Two things make this one difficult. First, the Sportsman Inn on Heads Lane used to be called the White Ox and is still open, so the name is in use elsewhere. Second, the street. uk puts this pub at 60 Durdar Road and closes it in 2007. But Co-Curate describes number 61 St Nicholas Street, on the junction with Woodroufe Terrace, as the former White Ox Inn. Two sources, two streets, and house numbers one apart, which is the sort of coincidence that usually means somebody transcribed a line wrong.
Filed on Durdar Road for now because that is what the lost-pubs index says, and flagged because it probably should not be. A fourth candidate complicates it further. The Carlisle Encyclopaedia records a White Ox as the village inn at Blackwell, demolished in 1904 to make way for a replacement built on the same site by the Old Brewery Company. Its long-serving landlord, Johnny Dawston, is commemorated in Robert Anderson's Cumberland-dialect ballad "Blackwell Murray-Neet," written around 1804; his widow, Nancy Dalston, kept the house for close to sixty years after him, until her own death in 1844, which if accurate would put the pub's licence well before 1789.
Blackwell and Durdar sit close together on the same stretch south of the city, so this may be an earlier chapter of the very pub this entry is filed under rather than a fourth, separate house -- but nothing yet ties the 1904 rebuild directly to the building on Durdar Road, so it is recorded here as a live possibility rather than a settled fact. A fifth White Ox turns up too, on English Street, in the local directories until 1837 -- a Carlisle Patriot notice of 31 March 1821 has its landlord, William Morley, fined for allowing gambling on the premises.
A spreadsheet row matches this fifth one cleanly on both name and street, unlike the confusion surrounding the other four, so it's treated here as a distinct pub rather than folded into any of them. And on the St Nicholas Street candidate above: a mural by Kate Norris now decorates that corner, recalling the building's history as a pub it had long since stopped being.