Arches

History

Carlisle's second licensed lap dancing club, in the basement at 4A Botchergate, with its door next to House of Vodka on the side towards the Woodrow Wilson. It has been given locally as Archie's, but every piece of paperwork calls it Arches.

The lower floor has had a licence of its own since December 2015, the year House of Vodka is first recorded upstairs. That licence was suspended in 2021 for an unpaid annual fee and restored in February 2023, when it also changed hands, which fits the opening of Below, a bar and nightclub that the Food Standards Agency inspected that month and rated five. What the basement traded as from 2015 to 2021 is not recorded.

The licence, PL541, passed to a new holder in October 2025, a month after Arch Bar Ltd was registered at 4 Botchergate as a licensed club, and that November the company applied for a sexual entertainment venue licence for the former Below, calling it Arches Gentleman's Club: lap and pole dancing and cabaret evenings, 10am to 4.30am. It described a female-run club with a small, discreet entrance, CCTV in the booths and contracts for the dancers. The police did not object; six members of the public did, on grounds from the view from the station to the club doubling the number in the area.

The licence was granted. The council's register carries it as SEV02, issued on 15 December 2025 for the year from 16 December, to Arch Bar Ltd trading as Arches at the basement, 4A Botchergate. It is the second such licence in the city; the first, SEV01, is Rouge's in Englishgate Plaza.

It joins a dense run: House of Vodka next door, the old Walkabout building and Felson's opposite, Ballers, Deja Vu, the Unit and Rouge in the plaza, Box Arena behind. The top of Botchergate is the most heavily licensed corner of the city.