The Currock Inn

History

Opened Built 1899, licensed 1903

Built

1899, as the Currock Hotel

Licensed

1903, after a four-year fight

Taken over

August 1916

Privatised

Sold to Greenall Whitley, April 1973

The Currock Inn was built in 1899 and not allowed to open until 1903, because the local temperance movement and the licensing authority spent four years arguing about whether Currock needed a pub at all. Thirteen years later the government took over every pub in the city anyway.

The standard accounts give that argument a single sentence and say nothing of who objected, on what grounds, or how it was settled. Part of it is on record. The Carlisle Patriot of 1 September 1899 reports a meeting called specifically to oppose a proposed hotel in Boundary Terrace, almost certainly this pub, the earliest concrete record of the dispute. The rest should be in the brewster sessions reports of 1899 to 1903. The pub appears in local directories from 1905 or 1906, a little later than the usually quoted dates of 1899 for the building and 1903 for the opening.

The suburb is older than the spelling. Currock appears in old documents as Currick and Cuddick, and a house of that name is on Greenwood's map of Cumberland in 1823. Currock House, up the road, became one of the first community centres in England in 1934, and its stables were partly demolished to provide stone for the extension of Eden Bridge.

It came under State Management in August 1916, taken from Jennings Brothers and by then trading as the Currock Inn. During the scheme years it was noted as the only pub in the area with table bowls, and around 1953-4 the scheme remodelled it to add a first-floor weekend room. That November the Board's list, still calling it the Currock Hotel, picked it as one of the seventeen houses in the city where spirits could still be bought to take away. It was sold in a substantial lot to Greenall Whitley in April 1973, the same buyer and the same month as the Arroyo Arms and the Crown & Thistle at Stanwix.

Its name has been round the houses since. Currock Hotel, then Currock Inn, then Cue & Rack when the snooker took over, then The Rock when it reopened in July 2019 after a spell shut, and apparently back to the Currock since. Listings disagree with each other and with the sign. Co-Curate still files it as The Rock, and the standard list of scheme pubs still gives it as the Currock Hotel, built 1899, now called The Rock: four names, and the paperwork is behind on all of them.

The latest changeover is documented to the day in the licensing register. The St Nicholas Arms on London Road closed on 23 November 2025, and this pub's premises licence ended two days later, on the 25th. A new gaming permit was issued on 9 December under a different holder, and an entirely new premises licence was granted on 29 December. Solway CAMRA's note of the St Nicholas closure has its licensees moving here, and the register's dates fit: a licence ending within forty-eight hours of the other pub closing, and a new holder a month later.

They traded through the gap on temporary event notices, and the register shows how hard they worked at it: 5 to 10 December, then 12 to 17, then 24 to 29, with a late notice covering Boxing Day on top. Four notices back to back, bridging almost the whole of December. A premises is only allowed a limited number in a year, so spending most of the annual allowance on one month is the act of somebody determined not to be shut over Christmas. Two more followed in January and February.

Small thing, if you like small things: there is an Ordnance Survey benchmark cut into the pub, the second in this directory after the Harraby.