Howard Arms Hotel

History

Opened 18th century

Building

Late 18th-century coaching inn, Grade II listed 16 January 1984

Guest

Charles Dickens, reputedly, on his reading tours

Also was

A temperance hotel, and home to the Belted Will Artillery

For part of its life the Howard Arms at Brampton refused to serve drink. It was a temperance hotel for most of the first half of the twentieth century, by Mike Tuer's records, in a town whose pubs went from dozens to a handful. Before and after that it was a coaching inn, and it is one again now.

First, the trap. This is the Brampton Howard Arms, an independent coaching inn ten miles east of the city. The other Howard Arms is at 107 Lowther Street in Carlisle, a State Management pub, closed at present. Same name, different towns, entirely different histories.

The name honours the Howards, Earls of Carlisle and Dukes of Norfolk, seated at Naworth Castle just outside Brampton and at Corby Castle, whose estate owns the Queen Inn at Great Corby. The Howards are to eastern Cumberland what the Lowthers are to the west, which makes this the eastern counterpart of the Lowther Arms. It once housed the Belted Will Artillery, a volunteer unit named after Lord William Howard of Naworth, the Belted Will of Border legend and the same man who bought Corby Castle in 1611; when, nobody has yet dated.

The building is a late eighteenth-century coaching inn, Grade II listed on 16 January 1984: incised painted stucco on a chamfered plinth, flush quoins, slate roof with projecting eaves, yellow brick chimney stacks, three storeys and two bays. Charles Dickens is reputed to have stayed on one of his reading tours, and there is memorabilia on the walls from the time of his visit; the signature breakfast is the Dickens Delight. That gives the site three literary or cultural names: Dickens here, Walter Scott at the Scott & Brassey and Bowie at the Thin White Duke.

It was trading as the Howard's Arms Inn by September 1816, when the freehold of Hall Guards, a 183-acre estate in Lanercost parish on the north side of the Roman Wall, was put up for auction there one Wednesday evening.

Brampton lay beyond the scheme's eastern edge, so this one was never nationalised. It is a Thwaites house now, family-run under the tie, the brewer's second house here with the Queens at Warwick-on-Eden, and Thwaites have refurbished it in recent years. There are five handpumps on the Thwaites range, including one badged as the Howard Arms: a tied pub with its own beer is a rarity round here, where most of the trade is Stonegate and Craft Union.

The restaurant is the grand oak room, with open log fires at either end of the building. Eight en-suite rooms, cask and a big gin range, and a weekly Chatter & Natter table as part of the Chatty Café scheme against loneliness.