The Near Boot

History

Opened 18th century

Built

18th century, as a coaching inn

Listed

Grade II, 19 June 1973

Remodelled by

Harry Redfern, under the scheme

Also

Within the Tarraby Conservation Area

There were two Boots on the road out of Carlisle, and this is the nearer one. The scheme's roll of 1920 lists them side by side, the Boot at Houghton as number 77 and the Boot at Tarraby as number 78. This pub stands in the Tarraby Conservation Area, so it is the Tarraby one, and the Far Boot was the Houghton house, long since demolished. The directories called this one simply the Boot until 1934, after which it became the Near Boot.

The Cumberland News of 3 April 1992 gives two older theories for the name. In one, a piece of land between the inn and the Far Boot Farm was shaped like a boot. In the other, the names go back to the days of riding: going out of the city the inn stood on the side of a rider's near boot, and the farm on the side of his far boot. The listing's explanation, two Boot inns a short way apart, is the plainer one.

It is one of the oldest pubs on this site. The building is late eighteenth century, on the road north out of Carlisle, and it was not built as a pub: the listing describes it as an inn, formerly house and stables, the two right-hand bays of the five having been the stables. Whitewashed brick, stone dressings, a graduated slate roof; Grade II listed on 19 June 1973. At least 230 years of use makes it older than the Turf, older than the Golden Lion, and older than the bank that became the Griffin.

A 1787 sale notice for a farm at Tarraby locates it "at the sign of the Boot, near Tarraby", so it was trading under this sign that early, and an advertisement in the Carlisle Journal of September 1855 offered the 'old Boot, Whiteclosegate' to let. Even so, when it became a licensed pub is less certain than the building's age. It is missing from an 1894 register, which may only mean the register did not reach out here, Stanwix Rural being outside the city.

It was certainly licensed by 1903, when the county justices heard an objection to its landlady, Mrs Sturdy; the report already calls it the Near Boot, three decades before the directories did. The owners had a new tenant waiting, J. Nicholson of the Drove Inn at Stanwix, but Mrs Sturdy, the Carlisle Journal reported, 'was doing all she could against them, and was wilfully withholding the licence', so the bench had to wait for it to run out in April.

The state held it from October 1916, at first through the Board's Scottish control office, and in 1929 Harry Redfern remodelled it, which makes it a useful counterpart to the Apple Tree: there he demolished and built new, here he reworked an old inn. The listing is unusually specific about what he did. He put in a second entrance copying the original stone quoins and moulded cornice, inserted glazing bars into the ground floor windows, added two more windows to the right of the upper floor to match the three already there, and hung plank doors. Careful, deferential work on somebody else's building.

The rear elevation, the part most typical of him, has largely gone under a more recent extension, and CAMRA note the loss with an audible sigh.

On 8 June 1929 the Cumberland News reported that 'the renovation of the Near Boot at Tarraby has been completed and a bowling green attached'. The pub then had a moment in the temperance argument. A Temperance Legislation League speaker who lectured on Carlisle used to cite a small pub a mile and a half out of the city, rebuilt with counter attractions to drinking, and in April 1930 he asked the general manager, A. E. Mitchell, whether its sales had gone up. Mitchell named it as the Tarraby Inn, this one, and said the alterations were not made because of the rise in takings: the chief reason was that the old building was inadequate for 'a growing neighbourhood'.

The state sold it on 10 May 1973 to John Smiths. The 1992 column calls it another city pub with a decent bowling green, which it had until 1986, when the green was converted to a children's play area at a time when family use of pubs was being encouraged, though two lanes were kept for bowls. Bowlers were in uproar, but a spokesman for the owners, which the column gives as Matthew Brown Breweries, said they could not afford to keep the green in its former glory, since the twenty or thirty bowling parties a summer did not bring in enough to pay a greenkeeper. The large car park behind the pub is thought to sit on that green, a scheme fingerprint that turns up again at the Turf, the Apple Tree and the Redfern.

It went through a long planning wrangle at the turn of the millennium, reported from 1999 to 2001, before a half-million-pound facelift finally went ahead, reopening in October 2001 with an advert billing it as a public house since 1760. In 2020 it was nominated as an Asset of Community Value, supported by the county councillor, on a simple case: it is the only pub across a very wide area, covering Whiteclosegate, Brampton Road, Tarraby, Houghton, Linstock, the Knells and Crosby-on-Eden.

Today it has two small rooms at the front and is open plan to the side and rear. Heineken hold the freehold and it is run by Star Pubs.