Crown Lane Cellar

History

Opened As The Lane Bar, 2011

Building above

Late 18th century; Grade II*, 1949

Names

Lemon Lounge, the Lane Bar (2011), Crown Lane Cellar

Crown Lane Cellar is a bar in a historic cellar under one of the best buildings in the city. Number 18 Fisher Street is listed Grade II*, the higher grade, from 1 June 1949: two late-eighteenth-century houses of one build, three storeys and five bays of Flemish bond brick with painted stone quoins, a columned doorcase with an open pediment and a radial fanlight up the steps, and a sixth bay that was a separate house entered from Long Lane. Inside, the listing records panelled doors in fluted surrounds, moulded plaster cornices, the original staircase with slender turned balusters, and marble fireplaces on the first floor.

The house has long since been divided into shop units, and the Fisher Street Galleries has the ground floor. The cellar is entered from Long Lane, so it sits literally underneath the densest cluster on this site: the Buffs next door at number 20, the Kings Head, the Old Bank, and the old Fisher Street Social Club. Carlisle's old quarter has vaulted cellars under a lot of its buildings; this one has a bar in it, which makes a pair with Bar Solo, where the real story is also the fabric behind a modern name.

The bar has had three names: the Lemon Lounge; the Lane Bar, opened in 2011 and a much-loved part of the city's nightlife; and now Crown Lane Cellar, which frames itself as continuing that story rather than replacing it. The name keeps the thread: Crown for the civic heart near the old court and Citadel, Lane from both Long Lane and the Lane Bar, Cellar for where it is.

Cocktails by the fire, wine in the garden, tapas, and a properly eclectic events programme: film nights, live music, dance events, a Regency ball, an author event with a bestselling crime writer. As much a creative space as a bar.