The Brickyard

History

Opened As the Brickyard, New Year's Eve 2002

Built as

St Mary's Parish Rooms

Named after

Canon Thomas Richmond of Carlisle Cathedral

Reopened

New Year's Eve 2002

Capacity

320

Arctic Monkeys, Kasabian, Foals, The 1975 and Kate Nash all played the Brickyard early on, before the halls got bigger. The Fall, The Damned and The Exploited have been through it, and so has a fair amount of comedy: John Cooper Clarke, Stewart Lee, Dave Gorman. It is Carlisle's oldest concert hall and its longest-running independent music venue, and a parish hall before that.

The band list is out of all proportion to the room, and geography explains it. The hall holds 320, or 350 by some sources, which for a city this size is the difference between touring bands stopping here and driving past. Carlisle sits almost exactly between Newcastle and Glasgow, so a night here is a natural break in a tour, and that has done more for the city's music than anything else.

The building went up as St Mary's Parish Rooms, named in memory of Canon Thomas Richmond of the Cathedral, and became known as the Richmond Hall or the Richmond Memorial Hall. It is well over a century old. After a long spell out of use it was renovated and reopened as the Brickyard on New Year's Eve 2002; some sources say January 2002, which may be the same night described from either side of midnight.

Fisher Street was a street of halls, and the Brickyard is what is left of that. A Quaker meeting house of 1776 stands at number 23, extended in 1864 and shops now. Number 11 was the Carlisle Working Men's Club. The Methodist Central Hall of 1922 is a few doors along, built by Laings of Carlisle, and it stopped being a place of worship in 2005. Add the City Vaults and the Fisher Street Social Club, both in this site's lost archive, and the street once had somewhere to meet for almost every kind of person in the city. One room is still filling.

Good draught range at fair prices, and it opens to what's on rather than to fixed hours.