Magpie Inn

History

Opened 4 December 1933

Opened

4 December 1933

Architect

Harry Redfern

Builder

John Laing

Listed

Grade II, 2011

Bowling green

The only one of Redfern's pub bowling greens still played on

The name is the building. Harry Redfern's idea for Victoria Road was a black and white magpie house nestling in a hollow between two steep grassy banks, and he got it: half-timbering, subtle asymmetry, horizontal windows and a diamond-shaped light in the attic. The pub is not named after a bird that happened to be on the sign. It is named after what it looks like.

It cost a hall and a pub. Botcherby proper is the old township east of the Petteril, taken into Carlisle in 1912, and in the 1930s the city council was widening Warwick Road and Victoria Road to serve the new estates east of the city. It bought land from the owner of Botcherby Hall, and the scheme then took 4,278 square yards fronting Victoria Road, and Botcherby Hall itself, for demolition. The pub it replaced was the Star, the only one in that part of the city and a centre for communal and sporting activities, now in this site's lost pubs archive. The Magpie was built to take over both its jobs, which is why it got a bowling green rather than just a bar.

Redfern was exacting about it. He wanted a feeling of restfulness, a quiet colour scheme, his usual coal fires, and a long low line of windows whose height was set to suit the number of brick courses. Olive Seabury records that contractors had to follow his rules to the letter. He chose the shrubs and plants for the garden himself and positioned them exactly where he wanted them, on the principle that the inside and the outside were one design.

The green was half the point, and half the site. The plot ran 140 feet by 275 and Redfern gave over half of it to bowls, with paved terraces and steps down from the pub and flower beds fronting the green. There was even a lavatory with its own door onto the verandah, so the bowlers did not have to come through the bar.

Built by John Laing, it opened on 4 December 1933 with the classic segregated scheme layout: a public bar, a smoke room and a tea room. The tea room sold soft drinks while the bar was shut and became a mixed smoking room once it opened, and a central entrance, now partially blocked, led to an off-sales counter. The first manager, Herbert Smith, died in the 1941 Gretna air raid.

A 1949 alteration added a glazed verandah with folding doors that opened right back during the bowls season and doubled as a heated darts alley in winter. The General Manager worried about supervising it, so it was decreed that darts could only be played under the manager's supervision, to be sure there was no gambling. Peak State Management.

It was sold to Greenall Whitley on 22 May 1973. In August 1997 death threats forced out a landlady who had been mugged. In 2010 the interior was restored to how it was when built. The work won CAMRA's Best Refurbishment award in 2011, the year the building was listed, though CAMRA are explicit that the interior is a replica, with the toilets, the windows and a tiled floor mostly original. Of the three great Redfern survivals, the Cumberland is the least altered original, the Redfern the best preserved, and the Magpie a faithful recreation of an interior that had gone.

The listing, Grade II, list entry 1404909, fills in the magpie: Vernacular Revival, white-painted brick on an unpainted plinth, steeply pitched and sweeping roofs with tall angled brick chimneys, three bays, two storeys and an attic, half-timbered dormers and a gabled stair tower, on a corner site with a three-room plan, the former veranda overlooking the green to the north and a service yard to the west. Historic England count seven of Redfern's pubs as listed, and the Magpie stands at the heart of the Victoria Road conservation area of 1968.

In spring 2013, after the refurbishment and its national award, Solway CAMRA's magazine found it selling only Oakwell beers from Barnsley, Barnsley Bitter and Oakwell Senior with no keg bitter, under Anthony and Sharon, who won the branch's Pub of the Season. In autumn 2015 the magazine reported that Samuel Smith's had bought it, though the 2010 restoration is usually credited to them, and it reopened in January 2016 selling no real ale at first.

The green nearly went. A photographer recording the scheme's pubs in 2017 found it still there but disused. It was restored and is now the only one of Redfern's greens still played on, with an active bowling club. Historic England, surveying the scheme's pubs, counted four greens left: this, the Horse and Farrier's, the Redfern's and the one at the Globe in Longtown. The Turf, the Apple Tree and the Near Boot had greens too, and theirs are gone.

The pub has had a harder time than its green. It closed on 29 June 2013 and reopened on 31 January 2016; closed again on 31 October 2024 and reopened on 15 September 2025; and closed once more on 31 January 2026, with Samuel Smith's advertising for new tenants. Three closures in thirteen years, and the brewery is known for leaving pubs dark for long stretches. It is registered as an Asset of Community Value, which is what a community does when it has noticed.