The Lint

History

Opened Built 1899

In August 1899 the residents of the Linton Street area held an open-air meeting in Lindisfarne Street to stop this pub being built. Plans had been announced to close the old Light Horseman Inn on Rickergate and transfer its licence to a new house here. The Carlisle Patriot of 25 August reported the Rev C. T. Horam, vicar of St John's, speaking against it, and a railwayman, Robert Long, saying it would reduce a respectable district to the level of Rickergate. When the justices sat in September it was stated that 430 of the 700 to 800 households in the area had signed a petition. They allowed the plan anyway.

The new pub was named the Linton Holme, because Linton Holme was a place before it was a pub: the ground between Greystone Road and the River Petteril. Nobody calls the area that now. The streets here are just Carlisle, and the name has been worn away everywhere except the sign over this door, the reverse of what usually happens on this site, where the district outlives the pub. Even the pub's own name has worn down. The Linton Holme Hotel had been the Lint to locals for years, and in 2023 the nickname became official, when a company called The Lint Ltd was incorporated at 86 Lindisfarne Street that October.

It was built in 1899, on land belonging to S. G. and G. F. Saul: a purpose-built late-Victorian pub, not a conversion. A photograph of it survives from 1902, and it shows the licensees then were Thomas and John Minns, with the lettering across the frontage reading Linton Holme Hotel. The building had already been extended to add an off-sales on the right, so the trade was good enough within three years to need more room, whatever the petitioners thought. The photograph also shows the original etched windows and the marble pillar outside, which CAMRA single out as worth looking at before you go in.

It was seventeen years old when the state took it, in August 1916 from the New Brewery's estate, by Historic England's gazetteer, which also records it licensed in 1932 and put up for sale in 1972. That November the Board picked it as one of the seventeen houses in Carlisle still allowed to sell spirits to take away. The Brewery History Society's roll of scheme pubs in 1920 lists it at number 31 and gets both halves wrong: Linden Holme rather than Linton Holme, on Lindisfarne Road rather than Street. Two small slips, and a pub disappears from any search made on the name it actually had. The roll is a transcription rather than a checked record, which is worth knowing wherever it is quoted.

For a building that kept its original layout, its etched windows and its marble pillar, the official record is remarkably thin. It is listed among the scheme's survivors within the old city boundary, but the scheme's own archive page for it has never been written and still reads text required, and the building does not appear in the listing register.

De Ville Taverns have run it since at least September 2009, when they served the gaming machine notice that still stands. It has sold cask beer in its time: when it reopened at the end of 2015 it had Yates Bitter and Sun Goddess on. CAMRA describe it as a former hotel hidden deep within the maze of small cobbled streets typical of this part of Carlisle. Inside there are several permanent dartboards, a billiards table, a large beer garden for the summer, and bottled beers from Sulwath over the border at Castle Douglas, with regular darts and pool nights, family events, and hours that shift for the football.