Felson's Cocktail Lounge & Stick Hall

History

Premises

6 Englishgate Plaza, Botchergate

Felson's from

2018 or earlier

Operator

Stonegate Group

The name is a film reference rather than a person. Fast Eddie Felson is the pool hustler Walter Tevis invented in his novel of 1959, played by Paul Newman in The Hustler in 1961 and again, twenty-five years older and teaching, in The Color of Money. Stick hall is the old American term for a pool room, which is where the rest of the branding comes from. Felson's is a cocktail lounge and pool hall on the first floor at 6 Botchergate, upstairs in the old Walkabout building.

The address is worth pinning down, because it is not a separate old building at the top of Botchergate. The council's gambling register gives the premises as 6 Englishgate Plaza, which puts it in the same development as Deja Vu, Ballers, Rouge and the Unit. Six of this site's venues are in that one modern complex, counting Headquarters on the floor below, and this is the one people do not think of as being in it.

This floor was Walkabout too. The Walkabout took both floors of the building, and Felson's was carved out of the upstairs, which is why the gambling register carries the premises under the joint name Walkabout/Felsons, with a gaming machine permit running from 4 May 2018 held by Intertain Limited, the company behind the Walkabout chain. One licence, two floors, and after the split two brands: Felson's above, Walkabout below. Stonegate rebranded the downstairs as Ularoo in October 2025; it closed in June 2026 and has reopened as Headquarters. The upstairs outlasted the downstairs.

Felson's is a Stonegate venue and one of a small chain: Bristol on Corn Street, which opened in 2018, Birmingham on Broad Street, and this one. Pool tables and shuffleboard, cocktails, craft beer, sport on the screens, and at the Bristol site a private room called Eddie's VIP Lounge with its own table and bar tab. Reviewers call the Carlisle one a grown-up room, praising the space between the tables and the cocktail list, and describe it as having turned the old Walkabout building into somewhere to start or finish a night.

By September 2026 it opens weekends only: Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, closed Sunday to Thursday. Aggregator listings still show it open every night from four in the afternoon, which it is not.