Border Gate Beefeater

History

Beefeater is the older of Whitbread's two restaurant brands, going back to 1974, and at its height it ran more than 250 sites. This one stood at Carleton beside the Premier Inn, off the A6 on the southern edge of the city. It is on this site because it held a licence and served a bar, and it opened at half past six in the morning for hotel breakfasts, which made it the earliest bar in the district by some margin.

It closed on 10 September 2026 along with all 106 remaining Beefeaters. Whitbread announced in April 2026 that it was giving up separately branded restaurants altogether to concentrate on Premier Inn, a five-year plan to save £250 million and cut around 3,800 jobs. Lakeland Gate, the Brewers Fayre on Walkmill Crescent, went on 7 September with the other 88; Table Table, Cookhouse + Pub and Bar + Block went on the 3rd. About two hundred sites in all.

So Carlisle lost two chain pub-restaurants in the same week, both of them the kind with a car park and a Premier Inn attached. Whitbread has agreed a conditional sale of 53 of the restaurants to Queensway Inns, who mean to relaunch them as value pubs, but has not said which. Some of these buildings will reopen as something and some will not.