The Woolpack

Gone

Closed 2004

There now

Houses

Where exactly

Placed from the Ordnance Survey grid reference, NY3966455663, in Historic England's gazetteer of the scheme's premises. The building's use in 2018: residential.

The first Carlisle pub bought by its own manager. It was built as a beerhouse around 1867, at 83 Milbourne Street in 1873 and 79 from the 1890s, after the street was renumbered. It may already have been trading under the name in February 1867, when E. Johnston signed the innkeepers' memorial for a Wool Pack, a few months after an older Woolpack on English Street had been pulled down. John Hodgson was its beer retailer in 1873, and William Henry Lawrence kept the Wool Pack Inn in 1884. Laing's original builder's yard stood next door, the firm that went on to become one of the biggest contractors in Britain and to build a good deal of Carlisle, including the housing at Botcherby.

It was a Carlisle New Brewery house when the scheme acquired it in August 1916, and the scheme gave it better lavatories in 1963-4. J. J. Hodgson managed it for several years before he left in October 1938 to open the new Cumberland Wrestlers. When the scheme was sold off from 1972, pubs selling four barrels a week or less were offered first to their managers, starting with forty country pubs in late 1972 and then a run of city ones; the Woolpack was the first Carlisle house to go that way. Its manager, having bought it, sold it straight on to Jennings, then a small county brewery.

That is why it still sold real ale. In February 1976 the local branch of the Campaign for Real Ale was founded in its bar, and at that first meeting it was one of only two pubs in the city still selling it, Jennings Bitter in a bar the size of a large shoebox, with the Crown on Botchergate the other; the Crown & Mitre made three within the year. That summer the pub's cricket team played the branch on the Sheepmount and lost by a wicket. It became known in CAMRA circles well beyond Cumbria as a regular in the Good Beer Guide.

A poorly conceived extension later took away its community feel, and after the long-serving publicans Jim and Moira McDonald left, it declined. It became an Irish theme bar, Biddy Mulligans, in 1997, and within a year was reported to have banned Irish music, which had been driving customers away, a detail that rather undercuts the theme. It was renamed the Knight Inn in 2003 and closed in 2004, following illness to its tenants, the Thompsons, though one record keeps the Knight Inn going until November 2007. It has since been converted to houses. When the branch turned fifty in February 2026 it held the party at the Milbourne Arms, across the road from where the Woolpack stood.

Sold in 1973 to its manager for £6,920. Who bought the rest

Photograph

Also lost on Milbourne Street

• The Spinners Arms

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

Still serving, near where it stood

• The Milbourne Arms

  Denton Holme
  80 maway

• Cumbria Indoor Bowls Club

  Denton Holme
  180 maway

• Tithe Barn

  City Centre
  330 maway

• West Walls Brewing Co.

  City Centre
  340 maway