The Kings Head

History

Opened Built as a house about 1784; a pub from about 1792

Building

Dated 1776 on the datestone; listed 22 March 1974

Named

1829, in the Parson & White directory

State-run

October 1916 to May 1973

Licensee

Mike Vose, since June 2001

Acquired

Maryport Brewery Co. Ltd, 1904

At the top of Fisher Street, on the corner of a medieval lane, is the pub its regulars call the Napper. It is one of Carlisle's three oldest: the Sportsman is the oldest recorded, the Joiners Arms has the oldest continuous name, and the Kings Head has the older site and building. All three claims stand, because they measure different things.

Rosemary Lane, on the pub's corner, was laid out in the Middle Ages to reach St Alban's Chapel behind St Alban's Row. The chapel and its graveyard are gone, and the shopping development put up behind the pub in 1988 sits on top of them. A lost pub called the Hole in the Wall stood on St Alban's Row too, so this pub, a vanished one, a lost chapel and its graveyard all lie within a few yards.

A panel on the Fisher Street frontage goes further back: Carlisle isn't in the Domesday Book because it was not English soil in 1086, and is, the panel says, the only place added to England since the Conquest. It credits William Rufus, who retook the city in 1092, with the castle; the William Rufus page is more cautious.

The building is younger than the pub's reputation, and it was not built as a pub. It went up as a family house, a wedding present from William Irwin to his son Isaac, who married Ann in 1784, with its main entrance in Rosemary Lane, not Fisher Street, into the early twentieth century. The date is carved on a marriage stone in the upstairs room, which is not open to the public, and nobody agrees on what it says. Historic England's listing reads the oval datestone as 1776; a fuller local account reads it as I / 1784 / I A, for Isaac and Ann Irwin; and Historic England's gazetteer calls the building seventeenth century.

Two details from the listing are worth a look. Between the upper floor windows is a firemark of the Newcastle Fire Insurance Company, the only one left in Carlisle, from when insurers ran their own fire brigades. And the return wall down Rosemary Lane has blocked warehouse doors on each floor, as the left two bays were probably a warehouse first.

A local account has the house sold in March 1826 and made a pub soon after, but the newspapers have a King's Head here well before that. Miss Ann Johnston's King's Head, 'at the top of Fisher Street', held property sales in 1811 and 1819, and in March 1826 the Carlisle Patriot offered to let 'all that commodious and well-accustomed inn, known by the name of the King's Head', 'long established', occupied by Robert Lamb, with a brew-house, stables, cow-houses, a room 37 feet by 15 and a grocer's shop adjoining.

By July 1828 James Sawyer had the Old King's Head, where the Free Gardeners' Eden Lodge showed gooseberries and carnations, and he became its best-known early landlord. Born at Martlesham in Suffolk, he had served in the Chestnut Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, through the Peninsula and at Waterloo, and Carlisle celebrated him as a Waterloo man. His commanding officer, Sir Hew Dalrymple Ross, married a Cumberland heiress and settled at Stone House in Hayton, which probably brought Sawyer north in the 1820s; Ross probably gives the Stone Inn near Brampton its name too. The family chemist's shop stood nearby; Sawyer left in 1854.

After him, David Waugh signed for the house in 1867, the 1891 census has George Lacy, 41, born in Lincolnshire, and by 1901 Robert Ridley, 45, born at Caldbeck, gone by 1911.

Its twentieth-century handover is the best documented of any pub here. The Maryport Brewery Company acquired it in 1904; the Liquor Control Board took over the running in October 1916; and the Licensing Act of 1921 passed it to the Carlisle and District State Management Scheme in 1922. Its women's bar was crowded on Saturday nights by 1923, and in 1966 the inside was rebuilt, with new counters by the works joiner Alf Edgar. It was sold to John Smith's on 7 May 1973, the same buyer and day as the Border Rambler, and in January 1974 the upstairs room with the marriage stone opened as the Falstaff restaurant, under its first manager, Harry Oakley.

The pub's own history says the present owners bought it from John Smith's in 1984 and redecorated it thoroughly. Today, though, it is a lease, not a free house: CAMRA record the freehold with Heineken, trading through Star Pubs & Bars, and the Morning Advertiser called the licensee as a Star lessee in 2016.

That licensee is Mike Vose, here since June 2001. He brought cask beer back, Yates Bitter first, when he refurbished it in 2002, He also opened the Fat Gadgie on Devonshire Street in 2017, and owns and rents out the Lint on Lindisfarne Street. Premises licence PL140 was suspended in March 2021 for non-payment and not lifted until January 2022.

It is the city's real ale champion: Carlisle City Pub of the Year across 2008-13, 2015-17 and 2022, Solway Pub of the Year in 2012, in every Good Beer Guide since 2004, and Solway CAMRA's Pub of the Season for summer 2026. Four guest handpumps, Yates Bitter as a regular, old Carlisle on the walls, and a big covered courtyard with live music. No children.