Museum Inn

History

Began as

A farmhouse, converted for drovers in the late 18th century

Name

After a landlord's taxidermy collection, early 1900s

Around 1900 the landlord of this pub, Irving Blaylock, a publican with an interest in natural history, lined the public bar with glass cases of his own stuffed birds and animals. His most celebrated exhibit, by the Carlisle Natural History Society's own record of it, was a piglet with eight legs preserved in formalin. The name stuck. The Museum Inn has nothing to do with a museum in any formal sense; the News & Star told the story in March 2017 without treating it as news, which suggests it was well known locally by then.

Its beginnings are hazy but evocative. It is believed to have started as a farmhouse, converted into a hostelry in the late eighteenth century to serve drovers: cattle, sheep and geese walked in miles from the farms west of the city on market days. That makes it a pair with the Drovers Rest at Monkhill, on the same western plain, both made by the droving trade. Farmhouse conversions like this are also said to have become outlets for the rum and brandy smugglers of the Solway marshes. Whether this one was is unrecorded, but the Solway's contraband trade was real enough.

It is in local directories from 1876, standing in what was still open country. Belle Vue was a civil parish in its own right, created on the last day of 1894 out of the rural part of Caldewgate, and abolished on 9 November 1912 when it was absorbed into Carlisle. In 1911 it had 339 people living in it; by 2011 the ward had 6,491.

The scheme took it from the New Brewery in August 1916, altered it in 1929-30, and around 1953-4 enlarged the public bar and the cellar. It belongs to the scheme in its own right, under its own name, and should not be confused with the Royal Oak in the village of Moorhouse, three and a half miles west: two different pubs on opposite sides of the city, sharing only a place name, this one standing on Moorhouse Road in Belle Vue. The scheme's 1920 roll settles which of them it means when it says Moorhouse: number 117 is the Royal Oak in the village.

By 1970 it was described as one of those old country pubs swallowed up by urban development on the city's outskirts. The description is exact in a way that is easy to miss: the country pub was standing in open country within living memory of people who saw the houses arrive.

Janice Harrison had managed it for over six years by 2015. Tom Coward took it on in June 2016, also running the Blue Bell at Dalston, which he had already had for three and a half years, with Julie Littlewood and Emma Dowson managing the Museum day to day. That September it shut for ten days for new decor, carpets, furniture, lights, signs and work on the bar. He called it a community pub rather than a village one, good for football and boxing nights, with room enough for a quiet coffee at the same time. The pub raises money for Eden Valley Hospice, and in January 2017 staff from two Carlisle firms led a sponsored firewalk across eighteen people over the car park, raising about a thousand pounds.

It was given a full makeover again around 2018: one large room that feels like three, a Tuesday quiz, and an adults-only bar area with pool, darts and sport. Greene King hold the freehold.

Belle Vue is its own place, not part of Morton, and the pub is the reason the suburb has an entry anywhere: Wikipedia's article on Belle Vue lists a school, a shop, a hair salon, two play areas and the Museum Inn. It borders Morton West rather than belonging to it, and the ward name, Belah & Morton, is no guide to it: Belah is on the far side of the Eden. The pub sits close to the western bypass, a few hundred yards from the Vallum House and about three quarters of a mile from the Reiver, which between them is the whole of the pub provision for this side of the city.