Spencer Street Social Club

History

Company incorporated

26 June 1947

Wound up

3 July 2024, on an HMRC petition

Renamed

Spencer Street Social Club, July 2024

Licence

Premises licence PL052, not a club certificate

This was the Carlisle Conservative Club until 2024, and the rebrand was not a matter of taste. The company behind it, The Carlisle Conservative Club Limited, was incorporated on 26 June 1947 as a company limited by guarantee, and it ran out of road in the 2020s. British Gas Trading presented a winding-up petition against it in October 2023, and HM Revenue and Customs presented another on 16 May 2024. The winding up commenced on 3 July 2024, with the Official Receiver at Newcastle appointed, and the company remains in liquidation.

The club itself did not stop. Spencer Street Social Club Limited was incorporated on 14 June 2024, in the weeks between the HMRC petition and the hearing, and the premises licence was transferred into the new name on 23 July. At least one officer of the old company sits among the officers of the new one, so this is the same club under new paperwork rather than a new business in an old room.

The licence settles a question most of the clubs on this site leave open. This is premises licence PL052, first granted on the 2005 conversion, permitting the sale of alcohol from eleven in the morning to one the next, seven days. A full premises licence, not a club premises certificate: legally these premises may sell to the public, not only to members and their guests. CAMRA describe it as members only with a function room free to non-members, which is how it is run rather than what the licence says.

The club is older than its 1947 company, but tracing it is harder than it looks, because Carlisle had several Conservative clubs and they are easily confused. The Carlisle Conservative Club was a shareholders' company whose thirteenth ordinary general meeting was called for February 1895, which puts its formation about 1882; its Hon. Secretary then was Richard Asquith. In March 1887 the Carlisle Patriot reported its move from a house in Castle Street, too far from the centre, to 'perhaps the best-placed premises in the city', the corner of Devonshire Street and Lowther Street long occupied by the late Mr Page, to be the headquarters of the City and North Cumberland Conservative Associations and the Primrose League as well.

Alongside it ran others. A Central Conservative Club began on Castle Street in the 1880s, was at 78 Lowther Street by the 1891 census, and moved in 1900 into new premises on the Victoria Viaduct designed by J.H. Martindale, two shops below and the club above reached by a six-foot open gallery. A Botchergate Conservative Club opened on 28 August 1893 in the former Albert Hotel and was struck off the register in 1903 for drunkenness on the premises. Bulmer's directory of 1901 has a Richard Asquith at the Carlisle Conservative Club without giving an address.

A Conservative Club on Lonsdale Street was registered on 6 January 1923, and that one may be the ancestor of this one, since the clubhouse stands on the corner where Spencer Street meets Lonsdale Street, but nothing on record connects them. What can be said is when the club was not here. Number 30 Spencer Street was a nursing home, run by Miss Clara Elcoate in 1927 and by the Misses Ellison and Anderson in 1931, so the club arrived at this address after the early 1930s, and plausibly around the 1947 incorporation.

The building is a later one than its neighbours and appears to sit outside the listed group. The terrace at 6 to 26 Spencer Street is Grade II listed, eleven houses of the early 1870s in red brick with sandstone dressings, and its listing notes that it was formerly listed as 6 to 28 because numbers 26 and 28 have been joined into one property. The renumbering happens exactly where the club sits. Drinkers describe the clubhouse itself as modern, and it is south of the listed run.

There is no scheme connection: the 1920 roll does not list it, and in 1920 it was not yet at this address. Set the club against the South End Constitutional, which kept its historic name and whose building was a State Management pub. Two clubs of Conservative origin in one city, going opposite ways: one holding the old name, one retiring it under a winding-up petition.