Harraby Pub and Kitchen

History

Opened Converted from a house and opened as a pub 25 June 1949

Opened as a pub

25 June 1949

Privatised

Sold to Scottish & Newcastle, 17 April 1973

Renamed

2018, on reopening

The Harraby Inn was somebody's house until 1949. The State Management Scheme converted a private house called Harraby Grange, sometimes Harraby Farm, and opened it as a pub on 25 June that year, the one exception among its post-war pubs, made out of an existing building rather than built new. That makes it the only pub on this site converted from a country residence rather than built as a pub or grown out of a beerhouse.

The name goes back a long way further than the house. Harraby Grange was an estate of 174 acres and, according to the History, Topography and Directory of Cumberland of 1901, formerly an independent manor called Henderbye, by then absorbed into the manor of Botchergate and held on leasehold from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The ground was a named holding long before anyone built a house on it, let alone a bar.

Its life as a farm is in the newspapers. The Carlisle Patriot of 20 January 1871 advertises a farm called Harraby Grange to let, and Harraby Farm was advertised again that August, then occupied by James Birney. A James Birney, innkeeper and farmer, aged fifty-two and born at Lazonby, was keeping the Caledonian on Botchergate in the 1861 census; the name is not rare enough to be certain, but a man who farmed and kept an inn taking a farm ten years later fits. Ann Fairbairn died at the Grange in March 1874. By June 1913 it was to let again and the advertisement gives its measure: seven bedrooms and four reception rooms.

The Carlisle Journal of June 1891 records Harraby Farm as belonging to the late Miss Lowry of Durranhill, and Durranhill House was built about 1811 for Richard Lowry. That explains a confusion. The National Archives index the scheme's file as Harraby Grange, Harraby Inn, Durranhill Road, which points a mile to the north-east, but the Grange was part of the Lowry family's Durranhill holdings, so the estate papers carry a Durranhill address while the building stands on London Road. Two addresses, one house, and a catalogue title doing what catalogue titles do.

The 1934 directory has Tom Cavaghan, bacon curer, at Harraby Grange, which settles the family connection: Cavaghan & Gray registered their office here, and they went on to become the largest employer in Carlisle until the London Road factory shut in 2004. The Carlisle Encyclopaedia indexes Harraby Grange straight to Harraby Inn, and the Cumbria Archive Centre holds a file for the years 1929 to 1948 titled Harraby Grange, Harraby Inn: the house and the pub are the same building. H. B. Wilson's official history of the scheme dates it differently, with the house acquired in 1946 and the inn 'completed in 1950'.

As a pub it belongs to the scheme's post-war estate wave, opened for Harraby's growing housing earlier than the Arroyo in 1958, the Royal Scot in 1960 and the Reiver in 1971. The Evening News of September 1971 reported that it boasted a fine bowling green, another scheme fingerprint. It went to Scottish & Newcastle on 17 April 1973, the same buyer and the same day as the Ship at Thursby.

It was the Harraby Inn for most of its life. In the spring of 2014 it put on a guest ale and became the Solway CAMRA branch's hundredth real ale outlet. It had gone up for sale in 2010, closed around 2016 or 2017, stood empty and for let, and reopened after refurbishment in 2018 as Harraby Pub & Kitchen. Heineken own the freehold and it is run by Star Pubs, which puts it alongside the Reiver, the Royal Scot and the Near Boot on the same estate.

One small thing to look for: there is an Ordnance Survey benchmark cut into the wall of the pub, under the Harraby Grove road sign, a surveyor's mark from the days when the height of the country was measured by hand, on the wall of a converted farmhouse.