Brampton & District Conservative Club

History

Was

The Black Bull inn, later a butcher's shop

Affiliation

Association of Conservative Clubs

Brampton's Conservative Club stands on the site of a pub. The Black Bull on Front Street was trading before 1818, and Mike Tuer's records have it closed and demolished in 1903 and the club built on its site. A town history tells it slightly differently, as an inn that became a butcher's shop and then the club, which reads as a conversion rather than a rebuild. Tuer's is the more specific of the two.

Brampton once had dozens of pubs and now has a handful, a collapse told on the Nags Head's page, and this is one of the buildings that came through it by changing what it was. It makes a twin of Club Britannia in Carlisle, which went the other way round, from political club to pub.

Despite the name it works as an ordinary social club day to day, in the same way as the South End Constitutional in town, though it is listed among the Association of Conservative Clubs rather than having cut the connection entirely. Its community role is easy to document even if its founding date isn't: it fielded a football team that Brampton Parish Council helped kit out in 2009, the angling association holds its AGM there, and it's a venue on the Cumbria darts superleague circuit.

It is a traditional members' club, with a bar and lounge, sport on, darts, snooker, live music and regular open mic nights, and a function room. Guests are welcome, and CAMRA members can get in on a card.