Howard Arms

History

Opened In the local directories from 1855

The best thing about the Howard Arms is on the outside, and for sixty-three years nobody could see it. The frontage carries late Victorian tiling by Doulton of Lambeth, put up around 1895 and signed by them, advertising the wares of Sir Richard Hodgson's Old Brewery: India Pale Ales & Mild Ales, Lager Beer & Stout, Wines Spirits & Liqueurs, in coloured tiles divided by paired pilasters with leaf capitals.

When the State Management Scheme took the pub in 1916 it boarded the whole lot over, because the scheme forbade advertising on the outside of a pub. Builders rediscovered the tiling in 1978, the same year a Cumberland News report noted that plans for the pub were being held up by the Lanes shopping redevelopment going in nearby; it stayed hidden until John Smith's refurbishment uncovered it properly in 1979, and it was professionally restored in 2009 by the Jackfield Conservation Studio in Ironbridge. If you want the scheme's whole philosophy in one building, it is here rather than in any of Redfern's.

There is a sharper edge to it than that. Sir Richard Hodgson's Old Brewery, on Bridge Street, was founded in 1756. When the government took Carlisle's drink trade in 1916 it shut three of the four breweries, the New Brewery, Graham & Sons' Queens Brewery and Iredale's High Brewery, and kept this one. Every pint the scheme sold for the next fifty-seven years was brewed at the Old Brewery. So the state boarded over the name of the only brewery it chose to keep, on the front of a pub it had just bought, and left it covered for sixty-three years.

The brewery outlasted the scheme. Theakston bought it in 1974, Matthew Brown of Blackburn bought Theakston, and Matthew Brown closed it in the spring of 1987, moving the brewing to Workington. The buildings are listed and are student flats now. The same company also put up numbers 15 and 17 Lowther Street in 1904, a few hundred yards up this street, designed by Henry Higginson to match the Three Crowns Hotel at the other end of the Lowther Arcade. Those are listed too. Hodgson's name survives in three places on one street and in none of them as a brewery.

The listing describes two houses of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, now two shops and a public house under one roof: a three-bay house on the left divided into shops, the three-bay pub on the right, double-depth plan, painted stucco with a graduated greenslate roof. It is Grade II along with numbers 103 and 105 next door, and it kept its four-room plan and a good deal of its Victorian fittings through the John Smith's refurbishment. It appears in the local directories from 1855. It is registered as an Asset of Community Value.

The landlords are recorded from 1865, when Mark Mather was the first to hold it, and one later name stands out for length: Harry Ross held it from 1985 to 2014, twenty-nine years, longer than anyone else on the list. Stuart and Diane Marshall followed that July. Stuart went to Carlisle Grammar School and had managed pubs for Marstons and Greene King before he and Diane ran an English-style bar in Goa for expats and tourists; they came home to take this on.

There is a story, told locally, that Laurel and Hardy drank here and that a photograph of the visit hung on the wall. Nothing has been found to confirm it. What can be said is that it is not far-fetched: Stan Laurel was born at Ulverston, the pair toured Britain in 1932, 1947, 1952 and 1953 into 1954, and they were photographed in pubs along the way, including one at Bottesford kept by Stan's sister. Whether they played Carlisle would be settled by A. J. Marriot's two volumes on the British tours, which list the dates venue by venue and which nobody appears to have put online.

The end came in stages. Closed for refurbishment on 13 May 2019 and reopened that July. Closed again on 3 September 2023 and reopened on 3 May 2024. The gaming register shows a fresh machine notice in June 2025, so it was trading then. It has since shut once more.

The BBC's Hairy Bikers, Si King and Dave Myers, featured the Howard Arms in Pubs That Built Britain in early 2016, using it to explain the Carlisle Experiment to a national audience.