Carlisle Station Hotel bar

History

Opened Built 1852

Built

1852, for George Head Head, a Carlisle banker

Architect

Anthony Salvin

Royal guest

Queen Victoria, 1853

Listed

Grade II, 13 November 1972, as the Cumbrian Hotel

Anthony Salvin built a suite of royal apartments into this hotel for Queen Victoria, with a covered way to the station platforms so she could step from her carriage straight inside on her way to and from Balmoral. She visited in 1853, with Prince Albert and the Prince of Wales, and took a meal there, but she never stayed the night, and the apartments went unused by the monarch they were built for. This is the hotel at Court Square, beside the station, not the separate County Hotel bar on Botchergate, formerly the Red Lion Hotel, though this building has traded under the County Hotel name too.

It was built in 1852 for the Carlisle banker George Head Head, dated and inscribed "GHH," to the design of Salvin, the Victorian architect of castles who also worked at Windsor and Alnwick; the Carlisle Journal reported it let to tender on 20 December 1851. Head's lease of 1853 came with a covered passage from the hotel to the station, kept up by the railway for £8 a year, for his tenants as tenants of the station refreshment rooms. Benjamin Breach, the first occupier, took the hotel about 1859-60.

A royal guest did sleep here in the end. In mid-May 1857, on a private tour of the Lakes, the Prince of Wales and his friends went, as the Carlisle Patriot put it, 'as a matter of course to the County Hotel, dined, and passed the night'. Next morning he breakfasted early, looked over the Cathedral and the Castle, shook hands with a few of the townspeople who had found out he was there, and left on the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway between ten and eleven. No other County Hotel then existed, so it was this one.

It opened as the County and Station Hotel. The 1861 census gives William Gosling, 45 and born at Clapham, Surrey, as manager. A separate County Hotel and Wine Company, a wine and spirits merchant rather than the hotel itself, traded from the same address from 1864. The hotel was extended in 1866-68, with a ballroom, and by the 1891 census Robert Koster, 42 and born in Germany, was managing a household of twelve visitors and sixty-two live-in staff. It has been Grade II listed since 13 November 1972, the listing singling out the elaborate ribbed plaster ceilings on the ground floor, the 1866-68 ballroom, and the extensive cellars under the street. The Carlisle Patriot reported a new lounge on 19 July 1907.

The tie to the platforms broke in the war. After friction from 1910 over a fruit stall, the railway served notice to quit on 24 March 1916 and shut the passage, and in March 1918 the hotel went to the King's Bench against the London and North-Western Railway. The Cumberland News of 23 March reported that the County Hotel and Wine Company, as owners of the County Hotel, claimed the tenancy of the Citadel Station refreshment rooms under leases going back to 1853. The railway raised a plea that the Board's action at Carlisle had ousted it from possession, though its counsel said that point was not being pursued.

At the hearing the complaints were called trivial by the hotel's counsel: one traveller could not get draught beer, but he had asked in the first-class bar, which only ever sold bottled. The hearing was adjourned.

The Board itself left the hotel alone. In November 1916 its general manager listed three Carlisle houses it did not mean to touch for the present: the Crown and Mitre, the Silver Grill restaurant and a County Hotel. Botchergate's Red Lion was not yet the County Hotel, so this is almost certainly the house by the station, and it stayed in private hands. As the County it did outside catering too. When the Cumberland Hunt Ball was revived in February 1922, 160 strong, supper in the Lower County Hall was served under the direction of Mr and Mrs Morton Chance, of the County Hotel: lobster patties, galantine of veal, raised game pie, Cumberland ham, ices and meringues.

The wine company carried on into the 1960s as the County Wine Company. Its advert in the Carlisle Journal of 21 July 1961 listed it as sole agent for William Younger's Scotch ales and Whitbread's ales and stouts, bottler of Bass, Worthington and Guinness, and distributor of Ark Royal eight-year-old Demerara rum. The Evening News and Star covered a new Grill Room Bar at the hotel on 24 May 1966.

The names since have multiplied. It became the Cumbrian Hotel on 8 March 1974, and the old County Ballroom reopened as the Blaze on 2 July 1986. In 1988 the Botchergate-facing side was refurbished and renamed the County Hotel again, while the rest became the Lakes Court Hotel, reopening on 1 July that year. Receivers were called in during 1993, and the building's heritage was restored after missing tiles were retrieved in October 1996. It later traded as the Hallmark Hotel and now operates as the Carlisle Station Hotel, part of Best Western's Sure Hotel Collection, with seventy bedrooms, five event spaces and a Victorian ballroom seating 180. The bar and brasserie serve guests and visitors.