Club Britannia

History

Liberal Club

1881 to 2008

Club 35

2008 to March 2013

Club Britannia

Summer 2013

Called a club, run as a pub, and not a members' club in any sense: pool table, dartboard, jukebox, and anyone can walk in. The club in the name is real, though, and old. For well over a century this was the Carlisle Liberal Club.

The building came first. Historic England's listing dates it to the early 1830s, built for Elizabeth Dacre, and it has been listed Grade II since 1 June 1949, as list entry 1297408, 'Liberal Club', last amended on 11 April 1994. On one account it became the Royal Trevelyan Hotel, also known as Hunters, in 1878, trading under that name until 1884, when it was sold to become the Liberal Club. A second source agrees on 1884; CAMRA give 1881 as the start of the club's tenancy here.

CAMRA's record gives the sequence from there: the Carlisle Liberal Club until 2008, then Club 35 from 2008 until March 2013, then this. Getting on for a hundred and thirty years as the city's Liberal club, and five as a numbered bar, before it became a pub with a jukebox. The paperwork tracks the reopening: a gaming machine notification was served in January 2015 and a licensed premises gaming machine permit followed that May.

That makes it the twin of the Conservative Club out at Brampton, which went the other way round: a pub first and a political club afterwards. Both are now places you can walk into for a pint.

It's a large one, extending a long way back from the frontage, with plenty of seating and rooms to hire, and it is owner-run, which the owner makes clear by answering reviews personally. Reasonably priced, soul and music nights, sports screens and a beer garden, and open from ten in the morning to two the next, seven days, among the longest trading days in the city. It is well enough established to have a bus stop named after it, Carlisle Club Britannia, which is a kind of civic recognition most pubs never get.