Le Gall

History

Before it was a wine bar, 7 Devonshire Street was where a good part of Carlisle went to war. In the autumn of 1914 the building held the city's recruiting office for the Lonsdale Battalion and the headquarters of the Carlisle Citizens' League, the volunteer body that kept the battalion in socks and blankets.

For the first years of the century it was a shop. John Preston, ladies' tailor and practical furrier, advertised it as his new address in November 1901: French millinery and mantles, real seal jackets from £10 10s, a London cutter for the tailoring, and the agency for Liberty and Co. of Regent Street. By 1910 it was Thomas Baty & Sons, cabinet makers, upholsterers and carpet warehousemen, established 1831, who also furnished funerals and removed and stored furniture. In February 1914 the agent W. P. Gibbings offered it to let with Baty's still in occupation: a splendid shop with extensive showrooms and workrooms, possession on 2 February.

Then the war. The Lonsdale Battalion, the 11th (Service) Battalion of the Border Regiment, was raised by Lord Lonsdale from Cumberland and Westmorland volunteers, and its Carlisle recruiting office opened at 7 Devonshire Street in September 1914. It is the same building: Cumbria Archive's own timeline of the battalion notes the office as 'now Le Gall restaurant'. Recruits came in by the dozen, twenty-one in one day from Caldewgate and Devonshire Street together, and when the battalion was allowed two depot companies that December, J. E. Plender resumed charge of the office here.

The Citizens' League met here too, Mr T. Carr having put the premises at its disposal, and members were asked to call in and sign the Citizens' League Book. In October 1914 it was turning donated flannel into cholera belts, paying women in need to sew them, with the aim of supplying the whole Border Regiment. It held recruiting meetings at the Cross, sent the daily papers out to the camp, and by April 1915 had collected and forwarded more than four thousand articles to the Lonsdales, from overcoats and blankets to razors, tobacco and pipes.

In April 1915 Plender went looking for a shop of the Lonsdales' own at the top of Botchergate, under the Red Lion, and by that summer the battalion's letters speak of Devonshire Street as the place where the Border Regiment's officials took every recruit they could for their own lines. On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme, the Lonsdales advanced at Authuille Wood into heavy machine-gun fire and suffered more than five hundred casualties, their colonel among the dead. The League stayed until December 1916, when its prisoners-of-war work forced a move. The members regretted leaving premises so long associated with their work, and voted Mr Carr their thanks for two and a half years' use of them.

Le Gall arrived in 1996, when Mike Hope, who grew up in Brampton, bought the building: three storeys of limestone block under a slate roof, with bars on the ground and first floors, a basement below and a two-bedroom flat on the top floor. The name came from across the road. Maison Le Gal, a hairdressing and beauty salon in a nineteenth-century building opposite, was a name a lot of Carlisle people still knew, and he kept it alive. Denise and Ron Wood ran the bar and bistro.

In October 2019 Sammy Norman, who ran the Shabby Scholar and the Dutch Uncle in Carlyles Court, took it on as Maggie Elliott and the Three Pillars, planning to open for drinks in mid-November. Maggie Elliott was his great-grandmother, who had her own business when few women did and ran a soup kitchen to feed Carlisle's orphans. The three pillars, already a feature of the room, stood for the three people who brought him up.

After several years shut, Mike Hope took the lease back and reopened Le Gall himself in mid-December 2022. He gave it the look of a French brasserie, with wine, champagne, cocktails and draught beer, and talked of food from the basement kitchen and a lounge in the big room upstairs. It opened at weekends only, and it still does: as of August 2026 it trades at weekends and for private events, on the same stretch as Connelly's Bar and the Thin White Duke.

Its owner is retiring, and the building is offered to let for the first time since 1996, at £40,000 a year with the flat, or freehold and business together at around £650,000, with a premium of about £97,500 for the name, fixtures and goodwill.