The Border Rambler

History

Opened Built February 1859 as the Albion Hotel

Opened

February 1859, as the Albion

Rebuilt by Redfern

Reopened 7 June 1917

Absorbed

Deakin's Vaults, the pub next door

Renamed

Border Rambler, 1992/93

Everyone who worked in a state pub was technically a civil servant, and so eligible for civil service honours. Mary Bowie ran the café upstairs here for nearly twenty-eight years, and when she retired she was recommended for the Imperial Service Medal. The recommendation went to the Home Office and praised her meritorious service and her unwavering loyalty to 'the Department'. A café manageress, put up for a state medal: that is what nationalisation meant at the Border Rambler, when it was the Albion.

It was purpose-built as a pub and opened as the Albion Hotel and Tavern in February 1859. Odd detail: the original entrance was off Portland Place, because two shops occupied the Botchergate frontage. Those shops came down in 1905 so the pub could be enlarged. Before the state it was an Iredale's Brewery house.

The state took it in August 1916 and shut it that October for Harry Redfern, the earliest Redfern work on this site, a decade before the Apple Tree. The job included swallowing the pub next door, Deakin's Vaults, so Redfern's first Carlisle job quietly erased another Botchergate pub. Inside, it is Historic England's chosen example of the scheme sweeping away Victorian snugs: the walls between the little rooms came out to make one big 'brasserie', with new fireplaces throughout and a single counter at the very back, from which the staff could see the whole room.

It reopened on 7 June 1917. Nine months closed, which for a scheme trying to keep drink under control rather than stop it is a long time to have a Botchergate pub dark. It came back with the Albion Café on the first floor, in what had been the billiard room, with its own door from the street. It took a while for people to notice it was there, and then it got very busy. If you want one thing that shows the scheme deliberately putting food into pubs, it's that café.

A contemporary account of the scheme's improved pubs, written while it was happening, names this one and one other in the same breath. The Albion on Botchergate, it says, has a dining room on the first floor; the Goliah in Crown Street, one of the poorest parts of the city, has also been adapted to supply meals and has a cookshop for an outdoor trade in food. A takeaway counter, in a state pub, in about 1917. The two pubs were the food policy in practice, one at the respectable end and one where it was needed most; the Goliah was gone by 1938.

Not everyone liked the new Albion. In 1951 the scheme's own superintendent recalled Redfern's first efforts here and at the Irishgate as earning nothing but adverse criticism: 'men and women will not sit in smoking rooms on plain wooden seats'.

It was sold to John Smith's on 7 May 1973, the same day as the Kings Head, and renamed the Border Rambler around 1992 or 1993. Nobody explains the new name. Not one source says why, what a border rambler is meant to be, or whose idea it was. A rambler is a walker; the border is eight miles up the road. Under it the pub was run in the mid-1990s by Freddy and Debra Rowland, a Carlisle couple who in November 1996 also reopened the old Crescent Inn on Warwick Road as the Whitehouse, now the Andalusian.

It's a nightlife pub now: DJs at weekends, keg rather than cask, darts, pool, late licence, no children. The heritage is all still under there.