The Spinners Arms

History

Opened June 1930

Built

1930, by Harry Redfern

Listed

Grade II, 1973, one of the first three scheme pubs listed

Also

Birthplace of the Carlisle Brewing Company

A government architect building a temperance pub in a Cumberland mill village put a crocodile and a kangaroo on the downpipes, and left no note explaining himself. It is the Spinners Arms, where more threads of this site meet than anywhere else: Redfern and the State Management Scheme, the mill that named it, and the brewery that was born in its outbuildings.

Start with the name, because it is an epitaph, and the listing says so outright: it derives from the spinners at the nearby cotton works, Cummersdale Mill. The mill was set up in the 1780s by the Forsters of Carlisle, run by the Fergusons from about 1830 and by John Dalton & Son from 1848, and it closed in 1903. The nineteenth-century Spinners Arms was named for the people who worked in it, and by the time Redfern's replacement opened in 1930 the spinners had been gone for a generation.

The village kept its textiles. The print works the Forsters built in 1801 was bought by Thomas McAlpin in 1835 and is Stead McAlpin still, which has printed for Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II and Churchill and put cloth on the Titanic. Cummersdale feels like a village because it was a mill village.

The old house did not impress the scheme. Its report for the year to March 1929 called it 'out-of-date and inadequate', and its 1931 report says it had been made out of two small houses. The plans came from the scheme's office in London to the Rural District Council in June 1929, whose committee pointed to 'the limited space at the rear'. Redfern designed the new pub and J & R Bell built it, the same pairing as the Coach & Horses, the Horse and Farrier and the Black Lion at Durdar, where this manner was first tried.

It opened on 30 June 1930: an Arts and Crafts country house with a low-slung roof, dormers and a gabled oriel. The 1931 report describes it new: brick, lime-whited, with a half-timbered and tile-hung gable, standing back from the road behind a grass forecourt. Where exactly it stands is disputed. The listing and Redfern's 1929 plans put it on the site of the old pub, while a local record and Solway CAMRA's magazine have it built on the field behind, with the old Spinners by the footpath demolished afterwards. A forecourt is what clearing the old house would leave, though the report does not say so.

Redfern's plan of May 1929 put three rooms round a central servery: a public bar in the cross wing, a mixed smoking room at the front that doubled as the tea room, and a men's smoking room behind, plus a tiny off-sales off the lobby. Local accounts call them a men-only bar, a smoking room and a lounge. The smoking rooms had table service, which is where the penny on your pint came in: the whole scheme in one detail. The 1972 sale particulars still list two smoking rooms and a public bar, but it has since been opened out around a central bar, so the three-room plan survives in the record rather than in the walls.

Much else survives. It was listed Grade II on 19 June 1973, one of the first three Redfern pubs to be, and it kept open fires, tiled fireplaces, wood panelling and a Delft pottery fireplace. Historic England's survey of the scheme's surviving pubs calls it a good and very attractive example of one of Redfern's smaller new model inns, with a very well preserved exterior, and singles out its unusually decorative rainwater heads and guttering.

Which brings back the crocodile. The decorative rainwater castings carry animals: a bull, a hare, a tortoise, a kangaroo, a crocodile and an elephant. Olive Seabury, who wrote the standard history of the scheme, says that the origin of the choice, and by whom it was made, remains a conundrum. The scheme's files name the maker of the leadwork, a Mr Corrse of London, and Historic England's survey calls the figures animals and mythical beasts. A 2016 photograph of the gutter on Geograph, by Rose and Trev Clough, shows more figures than the published six, and one or two look like people.

Matthew Brown's took 25 ex-scheme pubs in 1973, and in 1987 spent £34,000 on this one, finding 'a bit of a dark and dismal place that hadn't had anything done to it for 40 years'. It is also illustrated in John Hunt's A City Under the Influence of 1971, at page 38.

And then this: the Carlisle Brewing Company was born here. It started in September 2013 on a two-and-a-half barrel plant in an outbuilding, and by the end of 2015 had outgrown it and moved to a ten-barrel plant on the Kingstown Industrial Estate, but the Spinners is still its tap, with three of its pumps on the bar. You will meet them at the Beehive and the Griffin, and with West Walls in town that is Carlisle brewing again.

It is run as a family business by Alain and Alison Davies, who brew the beer as well as pull it, and it has been in the Good Beer Guide every year since 2008 and three times Solway CAMRA's Pub of the Season. Irish sessions on the first and third Wednesdays, darts teams, a pool table, a beer garden at the front, children until nine and dogs welcome. It sits beside the Caldew on the Cumbria Way and Cycle Route 7.