Crown & Mitre Hotel bar

History

Opened Opened 6 June 1905

Built

1903-05, for Walter Scott the contractor

Architect

George Dale Oliver of Carlisle

Cost

Around £50,000

Opened

6 June 1905

Listed

Grade II, 13 November 1972

Walter Scott stayed here. The novelist spent a few days at the old Crown and Mitre in December 1797, before his wedding to Charlotte Carpenter, who was living just across Castle Street with her guardian. The grand hotel you see now was paid for by a different Walter Scott, the contractor who built it in 1903-05, and between the two of them they cover most of this site's story. The name is a portrait of the city in two words: the Crown for the castle and the garrison, the Mitre for the cathedral and its bishop.

It began as a coffee house. The correspondence of Sir James Lowther records one in the town by 1695, and by 1746 Baron Clarke's Notebook has a prisoner quartered "at his Master's ye Crown and Mitre in Carlisle among ye other rebels", which puts the name in use during the Jacobite rising. Its landlord, 'Rebel Will Addison' by the Cumberland News of 16 August 1991, supported Bonnie Prince Charlie and sheltered the rebels once they entered the city after the siege of 1745. Bailey's Northern Directory of 1781 lists it as "Beck's Coffee House", and the Universal Directory of 1793-98, p631, has it "kept by Aikin."

By the end of the eighteenth century it was the main coaching inn of Carlisle. Hutchinson's History of Cumberland, printed in the city in 1794, names it and the Bush as 'the houses the mail coaches put up at'. George Hardisty had it from 1801, then the Irvings and the Kings, then John Gray from 1831 until he retired around 1842; the 1841 census gives him as "hotelkeeper," 45. An 1832 Carlisle Journal advertisement, with an engraving of the hotel, says twenty bedchambers had just been added. By 1829 six pairs of mail horses left the city every day, starting from here on alternate days, and as the last coaching inn before Gretna Green it was a stopping place for runaway couples too.

It hosted more than travellers. The Pitt Club, a dining and political society marking William Pitt the Younger's birthday, agreed its rules at a meeting here on 24 June 1814, with the Earl of Lonsdale as its first president, and was still marking its "sixth anniversary" in 1819. Near the end, the Estates Gazette called it a "Famous Carlisle Hotel" on 13 May 1899, and less than two weeks later the Carlisle Patriot ran a detailed history dating the inn to before 1745.

The old house was demolished in 1902, and building its successor cost the city another pub: the Spread Eagle Inn, from about 1795, whose site is somewhere under the hotel car park. George Dale Oliver of Carlisle designed the new hotel, and his original plans of 1902 are in the county record office. Peter Beaty's obituary in 1907 credits his firm, Beaty Brothers, with building it, plausibly for Scott as contractor-developer, though the sources do not spell out the relationship. The Carlisle Journal of 19 May 1905 reported that it would open on 6 June and had cost £50,000.

A Carlisle Journal writer of 1911 regretted the old house. Its doorway had a crown in brass on one side and a mitre on the other, which he had looked at as a small boy, wondering what a mitre was, and later saw sold in a Carlisle saleroom.

It was built to impress, and its Grade II listing of 13 November 1972 is rich: rusticated red sandstone below, brick above, a green slate mansard roof, four storeys and eleven bays, shaped gables, and two-storey bays carrying carved Art Nouveau figures and scrolled vine leaves. Inside are rib-panelled plaster ceilings, banded marble walls and columns in the hall, an Art Nouveau relief of Peace and Plenty, a wrought-iron staircase, a stair window in stained glass on a Crown and Mitre theme, and a ballroom with two rows of painted stone columns and a musicians' gallery.

It stayed out of the State Management Scheme for a neat reason: it was a private hotel with no public bars, so there was no public licence for the Board to take. The Board's general manager said as much in November 1916: no action on the Crown and Mitre for the present. The grandest drinking room in Carlisle stayed out of state hands by not being open to the public, and when the scheme tried to buy it in the 1950s it stayed private then too. President Woodrow Wilson visited in 1918, during his state visit to Britain; his mother was born in Carlisle.

It was sold to Granby Hotels in 1968, and by early 1977 it was the third bar in the city selling real ale, after the Woolpack and the Crown on Botchergate. Brigitte Bardot was photographed at the hotel, a picture reproduced in Images of Carlisle. A £1.3 million facelift followed in 1996, and from 2004 it was sold and resold repeatedly. It went on the market in October 2022 at £5.5 million, with ninety-one en-suite bedrooms, six function and banqueting suites holding four hundred, and revenue of £2.43 million in the year to January 2020, and it was up for sale again in March 2026, when its owner, Robert Peel of Peel Hotels, announced his retirement.