The Last Zebra

History

Opened 12 July 1916, as the Gretna Tavern

Built

1863, as the post office; top storey 1899

Opened as a pub

12 July 1916, the Gretna Tavern

Royal visit

George V and Queen Mary, 18 May 1917

Sold

To Eden Construction, 1973, for £82,215

Listed

Grade II, 22 March 1974

This is where the State Management Scheme started pouring. On 12 July 1916 the Gretna Tavern opened here, the first pub the state opened itself; it had bought existing houses at Enfield that January, but this was the first it made. The name pointed straight at the problem the scheme was set up to solve: the workers of the vast cordite factory at Gretna, whose drinking in Carlisle was holding up the munitions.

The Cumberland News of 8 July 1916 announced the ceremony for the following Wednesday at four: Lord Lonsdale to open it, Lord D'Abernon, chairman of the Liquor Control Board, to preside, and the Bishop of Carlisle and the Mayor expected to speak. It would open for business at six, and Edgar C. Sanders, the Board's general manager in Carlisle, hoped the Gretna workmen would come to premises 'being made ready to specially cater for their requirements'. At seven the two lords were to come back and make informal speeches.

It had been Carlisle's post office, which had just moved out to Warwick Road. Number 8 was built in 1863 for Her Majesty's Office of Works, to a design by J. Williams of London, on the site of the Butchers' Arcade of 1844, and a third storey went on in 1899 to bring it up to the height of the Athenaeum next door. Harry Redfern is credited with the tavern's interior, his first commission for the scheme. The building has been licensed ever since.

The Gretna was so busy within months that early in 1917 a second refreshment room was opened in the neighbouring premises, and the original rooms were refitted with upholstered furniture and new floor coverings.

Which building came first is disputed. The listing puts the 1863 post office at number 8; a Geograph record and the Cumbria County History put the older main post office in the central section next door, now Lloyds Bank. Historic England's study of the scheme's pubs gives a third account: that the tavern opened in the Athenaeum, built in 1840 to designs by Arthur and George Williams of Liverpool, which the General Post Office had spread into at the end of the nineteenth century, and that this is the part now a bank, with number 8 joining the tavern in 1917.

It had royal custom early. A photograph dated 18 May 1917 shows King George V and Queen Mary leaving the tavern by a door on the Lowther Street frontage.

The Gretna Tavern was bigger than the Last Zebra. By 1925 it ran along the frontage through the neighbouring buildings. Historic England's survey records alterations in 1931-2 that added a lounge and a retiring room, and a 1961-2 plan to knock the smoking room and public bar into one lounge with a new servery. The central part was sold to the Trustee Savings Bank between 1925 and 1938, and the rest went to Eden Construction for £82,215 when the scheme was sold off in 1973.

Since the scheme it has worn six more names: the Shambles in the 1970s, a fitting one for the old Butchers' Arcade site, then the Post in the 1980s, Finnegan's Irish Pub, Churchill's, the Gilded Lily, and since August 2014 the Last Zebra. The original glazed high roof has been exposed, which floods it with light, and the layout has stayed the same through every rebrand; regulars joke you never have to relearn where the bar or the toilets are.

It does world-inspired sharing plates, steaks off a charcoal grill, signature cocktails and a proper rotating craft list. It is on Lowther Street, the same street as the Apple Tree, so the scheme's first pub and Redfern's first model inn share an address line.