The Reiver

History

Opened July 1971

Opened

July 1971, the last the scheme ever built

Privatised

Sold May 1973, under two years later

Built for

New west-end estates with no other pub

Refurbished

2015, and again in 2023

The last pub the State Management Scheme ever opened, and it opened four days before the Act to abolish the scheme was passed. The Reiver, then the Border Reiver, opened on 23 July 1971; the Licensing (Abolition of State Management) Act was passed on the 27th. It is the bookend to the Apple Tree, one of the first pubs taken over in 1916 and later Redfern's first purpose-built model inn: fifty-five years apart, the first and the final one out of the door.

It was proposed in 1966 for the new Belle Vue estate, a part of the west end that had no pub at all, because the scheme's superintendent reckoned the incoming residents would swamp the already crowded Horse and Farrier and Museum Inn. R A Greaves of the Home Office Architects' Branch was architect in charge, working with Douglas A Reed and Associates of London, and Eden Construction built it. Historic England's survey thinks the layout followed the Border Terrier, since demolished: two big rooms, a public bar and a smoking room, reached from a lobby, each with its counter along one side. Music was part of the plan from the start, to pull people in from beyond the estate.

The name is Kinmont Willie Armstrong's: the reiver held in Carlisle Castle in 1596 and sprung from it by night, one of the great Border escapes. The sign reworked an illustration of him from Thurnam's Calendar of 1923, and has long since gone. F L T Graham-Harrison, a deputy under secretary of state at the Home Office, performed the opening. The rooms were fitted out with loose chairs and stools upholstered in black and Persian blue, and the Cumberland News admired its 'pleasant alcoves'.

The outside is the better half. Red brick with painted timber boarding upstairs and, on two fronts, flat shouldered concrete arches on rusticated brick piers, a touch more refined than the scheme's other late pubs. The timing was almost comic: it managed under two years in state hands before being sold in May 1973.

In 2006 a new entrance went into an old window bay and the beer garden corner was enclosed. The 2015 refit took out the central kitchen and lobby and made the two counters one long bar, and dropped the 'Border' from the name; real ale came back at the same time, for the first time in years, including one called Broughton the Reiver. By 2016 seating alcoves were still there, perhaps the ones the paper had admired, and Historic England rated its history high and the building, interior drastically changed, medium to low.

Heineken hold the freehold and it has been on the Star Pubs estate since at least April 2019, having been independent before that. It was refurbished again in 2023: large and open-plan, with food every day, a big games area at the back with three dartboards and a pool table, sport on, and a run of live bands, discos, quizzes, bingo and family days. The building is level and step-free with accessible parking, seating and a toilet, which the 1971 pubs tend to manage better than the 1929 ones.

Three sources give this corner three different names. This site files it under Morton. The licensing register says Holmrook Road, Belle Vue. CAMRA puts it on the Yewdale estate. Locally, Belle Vue is reckoned part of Morton by some people and its own place by others, and nobody is exactly wrong. It is about three quarters of a mile from the Royal Scot, and between them they are the only two pubs for a large stretch of housing.