Pirelli Social Club

History

The works club of the Pirelli tyre factory, an industrial social club in the long tradition of the railway, mill and pit clubs that once stood in every manufacturing town.

The factory came first, and it did not start with tyres. Pirelli's Dalston Road plant was built by John Laing Construction in two phases, and the footwear division opened first: the first pair of slippers came off the line in August 1968. The tyre division followed that November, with the plant generally dated to 1969. So Carlisle's Italian tyre works spent its first months making slippers.

Laing photographed that too. Their own record shot of the new factory shows workers checking newly made slippers stacked on stands, and it sits in the same John Laing Photographic Collection as the picture of the Royal Scot going up eight years earlier: same builder, same Carlisle office, one a government pub and the other an Italian tyre plant.

The club is much harder to pin down. No founding date has been found for it, and none of the usual sources carry one. The factory is thoroughly documented and the club is not, which is the usual way round for a works club: the company keeps records, the club keeps a subs book. Even its name is unsettled, appearing variously as the Pirelli Social Club, the Pirelli Sports and Social Club and the Pirelli Sport and Social Club.

It gives this site a company club to set beside the fraternal (the Buffs), the parish (Harraby Catholic), the political and the sports clubs. The veterans' club, the Ex, closed in June 2026 after a hundred and five years, so that particular set is no longer complete.

It is members only, on local report. Older listings described the bar as open to non-members, which is not how it looks on the ground, and most social clubs run on a club premises certificate, which permits serving members and their guests rather than the public. Treat it as a club you need signing into. Like a lot of social clubs it suffers from thin attendance, and the slow fade of the works club is part of its story too: the factory it belongs to is doing rather better than the club is.