County Hotel bar

History

In 1916 the bar here would line hundreds of whiskies up along its counters for the munitions workers coming in off the Gretna trains, who were said to bribe the driver to get them to Carlisle in good time before closing. Historic England's survey of the State Management Scheme calls the place Boustead's Bar and makes it the scene of the drinking that brought the state into Carlisle's pubs. Today it is the Portland Resident's Bar of the County Hotel, opposite the railway station and the Citadel towers, in a Grade II listed building (list entry 1208782) that has been licensed since the 1890s. Not a pub in the ordinary sense, but few bars in the city have more history behind them.

There was a Red Lion on this ground long before the hotel. An 1801 advertisement offered the "old accustomed house... without the English Gates", with James Henderson as tenant, Botchergate having lain outside the city's English Gate. The Cumberland News of 20 March 1992 quoted an 1885 reminiscence by a writer signing himself R.S., who remembered a low, whitewashed house with the red lion signboard over the door, beside Sally Adams's famous toffee shop, with a sanded parlour floor and spotless white tables under a careful hostess.

In 1820, R.S. said, the Red Lion was the most frequented market-day hostelry in either city or suburb. There was no railway station yet, Botchergate was still thatched, the Crescent did not exist, and the corner was a saddler's in an area called 'aback of the Point'.

The Bousteads, a family of Carlisle butchers and bacon curers with several shops in the city, held the licence across three generations, from 1827 to 1914, and treated the Red Lion as a sideline until Samuel Boustead made the great changes of the 1890s. Historic England's listing spells the name Bousfield; the contemporary Carlisle Journal gives Boustead, and the newspapers have the better claim. The new Red Lion Hotel was built in 1894-96 by the architect J. Murchie, with shops at street level and the hotel above, and was extensively remodelled and re-tiled by Doulton in 1896.

It was a thorough job: a new facade and stable, a new dining room, billiards room and two smoking rooms on the ground floor, two sitting rooms above, and ten, nine and seven bedrooms on the upper floors, with even the cellar and the butchery killing shop rebuilt. Sam Boustead died in 1913, a large sale of his unsold property followed in 1913-14, and the Carlisle Journal reported in September 1913 that "Mr Boustead's Red Lion" was still unsold. The family name stayed with the bar.

The state came for it last. The Cumberland News of 4 November 1916 caught the takeover unfinished: the Board's Carlisle general manager, Edgar C. Sanders, reported that only six city licences had not yet been dealt with, and the Red Lion Hotel was one of three still being negotiated, with the Bush Hotel and the Gaol Vaults, the last of which was to be taken over on 3 November. He meant to use a shop in the Red Lion building for the off sale of spirits once the property was in the Board's hands, so the scheme planned a bottle shop here. The name was still in use in February 1919, when the Galloway Cattle Society of Great Britain and Ireland held its annual meeting 'at the Red Lion Hotel, Carlisle'.

Improvements planned that year were condemned by the public as extravagant, but the scheme kept improving it anyway. Historic England's gazetteer and the scheme's own annual reports fill in the state years: by March 1929 the dining room had been enlarged and improved, and in 1930-1 the entrance was altered, a passenger lift put in and the public rooms enlarged. In 1958 the saloon bar was improved and the billiards room turned into a cocktail bar, courtesy of the Home Office. More work followed in 1961-2, on the bedrooms in 1965, and another round was approved in 1967, before it went up for sale in 1972.

When the scheme was wound up it was sold to Whitbread in 1973 alongside the Caledonian next door, £175,100 for the pair. Whitbread closed it the same year. It was partly a furnishing store, then bedsits in the 1980s, and was renamed the County Hotel in 1990; by 1992 the upper floors were a hotel again. It went through a bankruptcy in 1993 and was sold to the Cairn Hotel Group in 1999.

It is not the Carlisle Station Hotel at Court Square, an 1852 Salvin design that carried a 'County Hotel' name as the County and Station Hotel, and is the County Hotel on a contemporary list of premises never taken into the State Management Scheme. This building was in the scheme until 1973 and took the name only in 1990.

As of 2026 it has eighty-four rooms, some with views of the Citadel, a restaurant, a Green Tourism Silver Award and the recently refurbished Portland Resident's Bar. Reviews are mixed on the noise from Botchergate's bars at closing time, and on the bar's own hours, which nobody seems able to predict.