Arroyo Arms

History

Opened 23 August 1958

Built

1958, for the new Harraby estate

Opened

23 August 1958, by Major John Gibbon

Named after

Battle of Arroyo dos Molinos, 28 October 1811

Privatised

Sold to Greenall Whitley, 2 April 1973

On 28 October 1811, at Arroyo dos Molinos in Spain, in the Peninsular War, the British 34th Regiment found itself facing the French 34th Line Infantry, beat them, and took six of their side-drums and the drum-major's staff. The 34th (Cumberland) Regiment of Foot, later the Border Regiment, was the only British regiment ever to carry Arroyo as a battle honour, and the drums are still paraded by its successors. In 1958 the State Management Scheme named a new pub in Harraby after the battle, on the suggestion of the wife of G W B Shepherd, its general manager.

It is a scheme pub from the very end of the story rather than the famous 1920s stretch. Only five pubs were built by the scheme in Carlisle between 1945 and 1971, all on greenfield sites serving new housing estates, and the Arroyo is one of them. Talk of a Harraby pub began in 1953, when Colonel W A Ford was lined up to design it, but restrictions on building and materials slowed everything, and the site was only identified in 1955 and bought early in 1956. The Inglewood Forest nearby, built in 1953 and since demolished, had done well enough to justify a second.

It was a Home Office design: H A Metayers, the department's chief architect, with R A Greaves as architect in charge and M A Brooks assisting. John Laing and Sons built it, on an initial estimate of £17,830, and the London firm of Douglas Reed and Son were consultants, as they were later for the Border Terrier and the Border Reiver.

It was small by the scheme's standards: a public bar entered from Brantwood Avenue, an off-sales shop and a smoking room entered from Edgehill Road, and a service area between them. The smoking room was for men and women together, the first time the scheme had planned one without a men's-only smoking room beside it. The public bar had fixed benches and a small darts alley. Women's lavatories off it were discussed and put off until needed. The general manager had the public bar counter lengthened by 16 feet, which quietly dropped the scheme's old war on perpendicular drinking.

An old water course crossed the site, so the cellar went at ground level rather than risk a flooded vault, cooled electrically, a first for the scheme. It was sized for a week's trade, reckoned at 12 barrels or 350 gallons, which the assistant general manager thought too small. Heal's of London furnished it, the smoking room in black and gold and the public bar in green and yellow. The smoking room had a brick inglenook with a blue slate fireback, there for 'a pleasant intimate feeling' while electric storage heaters did the real work. A mosaic of a jug and bottle marked the off-sales. The Builder and the Architectural Journal both wrote it up in 1958.

It opened on 23 August 1958 by the date most often cited, or 23 June by Historic England's survey, which points to a letter from Major John Gibbon dated 24 June and a Cumberland News report of 27 June. Gibbon did the honours, in the company of the Border Regiment. The sign was a model military drummer, cast in aluminium, a free-standing drummer boy, by an unnamed master sculptor at the Kingston School of Art. The scheme's jubilee supplement of 1966, which dates the pub to 1956, describes him as an English drummer boy in English uniform, but with a French hat and carrying a French drum.

He vanished from the estate years ago and was assumed lost, until he turned up safe in the Museum of Military Life at Carlisle Castle, a couple of miles away. Framed Border Regiment badges once hung on the walls and behind the bar; they have gone too.

When the scheme was wound up the pub was sold to the Greenall Whitley Group on 2 April 1973. The two rooms were knocked into one, probably around 1984, when the stained-glass screens behind the benches went in, and the windows have since been replaced in uPVC. In 2016 Historic England's survey found the fireplace, parts of the bench seating and the full-height Shanks urinals probably original, and the outside much as built, and rated the pub a real departure for the scheme: smaller, plainer, domestic in scale.

It has been a community boozer ever since. It sponsors a local football team and runs karaoke and poker nights. No real ale.