The Boardroom

History

Opened Deeds to 1651; present building late 18th century

Deeds from

1651

Building

Probably late 18th century

Listed

Grade II, 13 November 1972

State-run

1916 to 1972

The best-named pub in the scheme, and the joke is real. It was long known as the Board Inn, and it stood directly opposite the State Management Control Board's head office at 19 Castle Street. So when it was renamed it became the Boardroom: a pub named after the government board that ran it, across the road from the office that did the running. H. B. Wilson's official history of the scheme calls it 'the only overt link' to the scheme in any pub name, 'situated appropriately opposite the General Manager's' office. That office is Bookcase the bookshop now, and the State Management Story archive, which most of this site's history comes from, is based there. The paperwork never left the street.

The ground is older than the joke. B. C. Jones, writing in the Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, new series volume 88, records that the deeds for this house begin in 1651. That is a proper source for an early date, which is rarer than it sounds, and it puts the site among the ancient ones with the Sportsman, the Kings Head and the Joiners Arms, though the building you are standing in is late eighteenth century with nineteenth and twentieth century alterations.

Paternoster Row is older still. It is named for the paternosters said walking the Cathedral precinct, and when the cellar was dug for numbers 4 and 5 in 1855 the workmen found a Roman road, which the Carlisle Journal reported that March.

A wine and spirit store operated here from 1845, and the building was first called simply "the Board" in a newspaper advertisement of May 1895, the source Denis Perriam traced for a Cumberland News history piece in July 2014; the Carlisle Patriot put it up for auction that same month. By September 1897 it was the Board Inn. Its licence passed that month from James Finnigan to William Oliver Turnbull, and its solicitor asked for it to open seven days instead of six. It was shut on Sundays, he said, while an unlicensed club within fifty yards did business from first thing in the morning to last thing at night and took its customers. The Mayor told him the application would not be granted.

It was a scheme pub from 1916 until 1972, essentially the whole experiment, spent next door to its own headquarters. It was altered in 1922, and in the summer of 1965 it closed for the refurbishment that made its name in the trade. It reopened on 20 December 1965, and the Evening News and Star ran a supplement to mark it the next day. Historic England's survey dates the work to about 1966 and says what it did: the rooms were opened up into larger spaces and the bar counter replaced, 'with the accent on space, light and comfort'.

The scheme's jubilee supplement of October 1966 called it the most notable face-lift of all, the job that 'set the trend for city bars in general': the building stripped and reconstructed, and a number of small old-fashioned rooms making way for one large bar.

Cathedral, presumably the brewery, was reported in July 1971 to be proposing a takeover, and the Cumberland News marked the building's history again in October 1990, under the headline "The board of the board..."

It has three addresses and answers to all of them. This site files it at 8 Paternoster Row; the State Management Story gives 8-8A; the listing calls it 42 Castle Street and adds that it includes number 9 Paternoster Row. It is a corner building, three storeys and four bays to Castle Street with a five-bay return down Paternoster Row, listed Grade II on 13 November 1972 and amended in 1994: painted rendered walls on a chamfered plinth, V-jointed quoins, a graduated green slate roof with coped gables and kneelers, original rendered chimney stacks, and sash windows with glazing bars in painted stone architraves. The ground floor interior has been altered, which is what the 1960s and 1980s did to it.

One detail in the listing is worth holding against the tunnel story the regulars tell. At the extreme right there is a through passage with an iron gate, an original opening running into the building. Old cellars and blocked passages are exactly what tunnel legends are made of, and this pub has a real one you can stand in.

And there is one absence. The State Management Story archive, run out of the building this pub spent fifty-six years staring at, holds nothing of its own for it. Its page there has an image gallery marked coming soon and a documents section marked coming soon, and has done since 2016. The Apple Tree has fourteen cuttings and memos, construction plans and council minutes. The Board Inn, the pub named after the Board, across the road from the Board, has not one piece of paper of its own; it turns up only in the archive's general documents.

It is a traditional pub by the Cathedral now: value lunches, a Wednesday quiz, a free jukebox on Fridays, and attractive glass panels above the bar showing Victorian Carlisle. One caveat: CAMRA flag it for serving Fresh Ale, keg beer through a cask handpump, so the ale isn't genuine cask.