Print Yard

History

Opened 2020 or 2021

Licensed

9 September 2020

Named Print Yard by

April 2021

Court

Old Post Office Court

Old Post Office Court is named for Carlisle's post office, which stood here from 1840. Before that it had been in St Cuthbert's Lane, where the first mail coach came in in 1785; in 1863 it moved to the new building on Lowther Street that is now the Last Zebra, and in 1916 to Warwick Road, now the Halston. What survives of the court is only part of it. The Carlisle Kid, tracing lost licensed premises on English Street, notes that the modern River Island building appears to have been built partly over the site, so the yard you drink in is the remnant of a bigger one.

That makes the Print Yard a third venue on this site whose location remembers a vanished civic building, with the Halston in the former GPO and Bar Solo in the old County Hotel entrance. Carlisle keeps drinking in the shells of its institutions. The Print Yard name itself is styling rather than a documented printing works on the site.

It is a lockdown-era business. The premises licence, PL627, was granted on a new application on 9 September 2020, in the middle of the pandemic year, and a change of premises name and plan went through by April 2021, which is when the Print Yard name settles on it. A full premises licence, not a club certificate, so anyone can walk in.

It is a courtyard street-food and cocktail yard hidden up a lane off Devonshire Street, in the same Cathedral-quarter pocket as the Thin White Duke: world street food, cocktails, craft beer, baked things, and a bright heated courtyard with the walls painted.