Stanwix, Carlisle

Crown & Thistle

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Taken 4 August 1916. The sign shows James I, who united the two crowns in 1603, an apt thing to find in Stanwix, where the frontier has run for two thousand years.

Sold as the Crown and Thistle to Greenall Whitley as part of Group 2, handed over on 3 April 1973. Who bought the rest

Down-to-earth Stanwix local, open all day every day. Sport and racing on, good beer, no food. It runs on regulars and banter.

Part of Punch Pubs & Co (tenanted)

Today: See opening hours
Address: 53 Church Street, Stanwix, Carlisle CA3 9DS
Phone: 01228 532965

Directions Ring them

History

Opened Late 18th or early 19th century

Built: Late 18th or early 19th century
Taken over: 4 August 1916
Privatised: Sold to Greenall Whitley, 3 April 1973
Also: Registered as an Asset of Community Value

The sign shows James I, VI of Scotland, who united the two crowns in 1603: crown for England, thistle for Scotland. It is the right name for Stanwix, which sits on the old frontier and was the site of the largest cavalry fort on Hadrian's Wall. This corner has been marking the boundary between two countries for the best part of two thousand years.

First, though, the thing everyone gets wrong. There are two State Management-era Crowns in Stanwix, about a tenth of a mile apart. This is the Crown & Thistle on Church Street, an older building taken into the scheme. The Crown Inn on Scotland Road is a different pub, built new by Harry Redfern in 1937. If you see 'Redfern, 1937' attached to a Stanwix Crown, it isn't this one.

Stanwix was a village in its own right long before it was a suburb, the head of its own ancient parish, centred on St Michael's Church just south of this pub, and it stayed independent of Carlisle until 1912. The building dates from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. What is missing is anything on it from before 1829, when James Robinson is named at the sign in the directory, p163.

The Robinsons held it across at least two generations: the 1851 census gives Sarah Robinson, 63 and born in Carlisle, as innkeeper, and James Robinson, 37, is the innkeeper of the 1861 census. Robert Irving, 34 and born at Walton, Cumberland, is recorded there in 1901, and a facade photograph from around 1902 is reproduced in Carlisle the Archive Photographs, p73.

A Carlisle Old Brewery house, it was taken under the scheme on 4 August 1916. The Cumberland News of 26 August 1916 lists a Crown Hotel, Stanwix, among the houses taken that week, which by its date is very probably the other Stanwix Crown. In 1967 the scheme turned the kitchen and larder into a ladies' lavatory and bottle store, and on 3 April 1973 it sold the pub to Greenall Whitley, alongside the Arroyo and the Currock.

Greenall Whitley would not sell real ale in the city, and in the local CAMRA branch's first year the Crown & Thistle was the scene of a stunt: the branch got hold of a cask of real Greenalls Bitter and sold it here in under twenty minutes. Lakescene magazine ran an illustrated piece on the pub in May 1977, p11.

Solway CAMRA made it Pub of the Season for autumn 2013. The landlord then was Ian Johnston, known to everyone as Fly, who had run it for seven years and had just put in a second handpump. The branch described a two-roomed local, public bar to the right and lounge to the left, and called it a pub of great character and great characters. After 1917 the licensing register is the main record: the premises licence was converted under grandfather rights in November 2005 and the holder's name changed in September 2017.