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. Not to be confused with the Howard Arms at Brampton.

The building is older than the tiles. 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. The pub appears in the local directories from 1855, and Mark Mather, the first landlord on record, is already there in the directory of 1858, at 55 Lowther Street; the street was renumbered twice, making it 16 by 1873 and 107 by 1910.

When the State Management Scheme took the pub in July 1916 it boarded the whole frontage over, because the scheme forbade advertising on the outside of a pub. There is a sharper edge to that. Hodgson's Old Brewery, on Bridge Street, was founded in 1756, and when the government took Carlisle's drink trade 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. If you want the scheme's whole philosophy in one building, it is here rather than in any of Redfern's.

The scheme reconstructed the public rooms and put in new lavatories in 1962-3, and the pub kept its four-room plan and a good deal of its Victorian fittings through what came next. 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, sixty-three years after it was covered, and in 2009 it was professionally restored by the Jackfield Conservation Studio in Ironbridge.

The brewery outlasted the scheme, briefly. Theakston bought it in 1974 and Matthew Brown of Blackburn bought Theakston in 1984. Matthew Brown had warned CAMRA that a Scottish & Newcastle takeover would close the Carlisle brewery; in 1986 it announced the closure itself, and despite a protest march it shut in the spring of 1987, moving the brewing to Workington. The buildings are listed and are student flats now. The same company had 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.

One landlord stands out for length. Harry Ross held it, with his wife Pat, from 1985 to 2014, twenty-nine years, longer than anyone else on the list; the local CAMRA branch, reporting their retirement in the summer of 2014, put it at over thirty and credited them with turning a struggling pub into one of the most popular in the city. 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 confirms 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. The BBC's Hairy Bikers, Si King and Dave Myers, certainly came, featuring it in Pubs That Built Britain in early 2016 to explain the Carlisle Experiment to a national audience.

The end came in stages. It closed for refurbishment on 13 May 2019 and reopened that July. It closed again on 3 September 2023 and reopened on 3 May 2024, with Theakston Best and XB on and plans for a pool and darts room upstairs. Early in 2025 Solway CAMRA heard it would close at the end of February, its lease not renewed, but the gaming register shows a fresh machine notice in June 2025, so it was trading then. It closed once more on 30 September 2025. It is registered as an Asset of Community Value.