The Horse and Farrier

History

Opened 16 September 1929

Built

1928, dated on a rear panel

Opened

16 September 1929

Architect

Harry Redfern

Listed

Grade II, 22 February 1973

Reopened

14 March 2026, after a £2m restoration

For nearly twenty years one of Harry Redfern's finest pubs stood boarded up on Wigton Road, fought over by a supermarket, the planners and, reportedly, a future king. It opened again in March 2026, and it is the best rescue story on this site.

There has been a Horse and Farrier on the road in from the west for around two hundred years, by the Cumberland News of 28 February 1992, though not always in the same place. The original stood on the eastern side of the junction, at the end of a range that included a smithy and a joiner's shop, which no doubt gave the pub its name, at a point the maps called Old Raffles, where a group of shops now stands. A farrier shoes horses, and historically doctored them a bit too; the pub's 1966 sign showed a blacksmith shoeing a sturdy carthorse, for the smithy that once stood near the site.

Council minutes for 1889-90 record planning permission for a new inn there, which the column thinks had a fairly short life as a pub, though it was still standing as a house after 1929.

The scheme took the old Iredale's house in August 1916, and by the 1920s it was overcrowded and the city was building round it. A bigger pub was proposed on 23 February 1927, for the old house and two new estates, and Redfern's plans are dated 17 June 1927, by Historic England's survey; the panel at the back is dated 1928, which is the building. J & R Bell, who were building the Raffles and Longsowerby estates for the city in 1928-30, are credited by the Carlisle Encyclopaedia with the pub itself, alongside the Black Lion at Durdar and the Coach and Horses at Kingstown. The pub went up with the houses, not as an afterthought.

It opened on 16 September 1929 on the opposite side of the road from the old house, the same pattern as the Apple Tree and the Crown Inn: supersede the old pub, build a model one. It was the largest of Redfern's three suburban pubs of 1929 and the most thoroughly Arts and Crafts, and his first with a bowling green, which was hugely popular for as long as the pub was open. A heritage consultant called it one of his most accomplished designs.

The plan was an L. The public bar and smoking room at the front were men only, each with its own door. The smoking room had no counter: it was first class, with table service and probably dearer drink. The tea and club room behind doubled as a mixed smoking room, with bell pushes and a door onto a veranda along the whole side above the green. Benches were African mahogany, and Japanese oak in the smoking room. The 1972 sale particulars add a darts alley.

It was a busy house. M. Forster's memoir My Life in Houses recalls the Friday and Saturday crowd ending up in her family's hedge on Orton Road, opposite the pub, after last orders: "a great mass of roaring, fighting men (and a few women)", some clinging to it for support.

It was listed Grade II on 22 February 1973: painted stucco on a brick plinth, a steeply pitched hipped roof in red tile with gabled half-dormers, original brick chimney stacks, and full-height canted bays with leaded casements around a central round-arched feature. Even the low red sandstone wall and wrought-iron railings out front are listed separately, also Redfern, also 1928. The listing still carries its old name, Raffles The Horse and Farrier, from when this end of Wigton Road was reckoned to be Raffles rather than Morton.

Then it went wrong. Released from state ownership in 1973, it closed in 2007 after a dispute with planners over plastic windows fitted into the listed building, and stood boarded up for more than a decade. Tesco bought it in 2008 and spent years trying to put a Tesco Express on the site. King Charles, then Prince of Wales, reportedly helped secure an assurance from Tesco that the pub would be protected. Permission was eventually granted on condition it stayed a pub, and Tesco dropped the plans in 2015. Through all of it the plan held: drawings of 2009 still showed Redfern's three rooms round a central servery, though the veranda was enclosed and the off-sales had become a kitchen.

Richard Berry, a Carlisle-born businessman, bought it from Tesco in 2018. The first estimate was £1.5 million and about twenty-five jobs, with the manager's flat upstairs turned into en-suite rooms. It ended up costing £2 million and taking almost eight years: the building was in worse condition than anyone expected, Covid forced it to be mothballed, and his other businesses took priority when they reopened.

It finally opened on Saturday 14 March 2026 and served close to five hundred meals over the test night and opening weekend. The opening menu was pub cooking rather than anything clever, toad in the hole, corned beef hash and fisherman's pie, all at fourteen pounds, which fits a pub built for an ordinary residential estate. The rebuilt pub is step-free from the car park throughout, with an accessible toilet, and sanitary bins in the men's as well: a small thing, and more than most listed buildings manage.