Lost pub · English Street

The White Swan Inn

Gone 1883

Gone: Demolished 1883
There now: Not established
Address: 55 English Street
Where exactly: On English Street. The exact spot isn't known, so the pin marks the street, not the building.

At 55 English Street, between the String of Horses and the Grey Goat, and trading before 1777. In 1811 John Pool's carrier for Annan left from it. William Henderson was innkeeper in 1829 and James Taylor in 1861, and the inn was demolished in 1883, a year before the Grey Goat and the Kings Arms drop out of the directories. A photograph of it survives from about 1870, taken not long before it went. The 1870s and 80s took out the top end of the street: the White Hart and the Royal in 1874, the White Swan in 1883. A Roman relief of the Mother Goddess turned up on the demolition site in 1883 and is in Carlisle Museum today. A 1991 retrospective remembered it, too, as the pub that had the city's last mounting stone.

The Cumberland News of 8 February 1991 ('Pub that had city's last mounting stone') says it stood on the west side of the street and was obliterated in 1883, its destruction reported in the Carlisle Patriot of 9 March. In front of it were the last horse mounting stones in English Street, and the Patriot commented that it was possibly the last horse stone in the city, people no longer riding their horses right up to the premises they wished to visit. The inn went to make way for the 'handsome new premises' of the tailors Wilson, Jespers and Co.

It had been offered at auction in September 1882 with the estate of the late Mrs Robson of Cumwhinton, a site of 468 square yards running from English Street through to Blackfriars Street; John Reay of the Rose and Crown joined the bidding, it was withdrawn at £4,050 against a reserve of £4,800, and Wilson, Jespers and Co. bought it privately the next day for £4,725. The column's picture was taken in 1878, when Henry Simmons kept the inn: the small shop on the left, with men in the doorway, was the inquiry office of the Glasgow and South Western Railway, and the large semi-circular first-floor window to its left is probably the one still to be seen in the property roughly opposite W. H. Smith's.

It had lost its licence by September 1884, when the Chief Constable's annual report gave the White Swan Inn and the Trevelyan Hotel as the year's two licensed houses fewer. Henry Simmons had taken the licence from James Bewley in May 1876. W. Johnston signed the innkeepers' memorial of February 1867 for the White Swan.

Photograph

Sources 8

cumberlandscarrow.com
CARLISLE_PUBS_Ver_3.xls (Mike Tuer's pub database)
The Cumberland News, 8 February 1991, p. 4: 'Lore and More' (Norman Nicholson), 'Pub that had city's last mounting stone' (via newspapers.com)
Carlisle Express and Examiner, 6 September 1884, p. 5: 'City Brewster Sessions' (via British Newspaper Archive)
Carlisle Express and Examiner, 6 May 1876, p. 8: 'Transfer of licences' (via British Newspaper Archive)
Carlisle Journal, 22 February 1867, p. 6: the Public Houses Closing Act and the innkeepers' memorial (via British Newspaper Archive)
Jollie's Cumberland Guide & Directory (Carlisle: F. Jollie & Sons, 1811), p. vii: carriers and the inns they left from (Google Books scan of the Bodleian copy)
Carlisle Journal, 29 September 1882, p. 5: 'The White Swan Inn, Carlisle, estate at Cumwhinton, and fields at the Raffles' (via British Newspaper Archive)

Open question

A date we can't pin down

When was the White Swan photographed? This page says about 1870, but the Cumberland News of 8 February 1991 says the picture was taken in 1878, when Henry Simmons kept the inn.

If you know the answer, or where it might be found (an old photograph, a family story, a document), tell us and it goes into the story above.

Tell us about The White Swan Inn