The Tavern

History

Through an arch off Longtown's wide high street is a plain local with a pool table and a big garden, and a better claim to history than it lets on. It is the only new pub the State Management Scheme built in England during the First World War, and it was built in a town where the state had just shut the drink trade down. It was the Globe once, then the Globe Tavern, and now just the Tavern; the scheme's rolls have it under its old name, at Bank Street. Same house, three names, each shorter than the last.

Longtown is not an old town that grew. The Grahams of Netherby drew it up and built it in the middle of the eighteenth century, an early example of what would now be called a new town, with wide tree-lined streets laid out on purpose; the high street is so wide that the town has long been nicknamed Dodge City. Robert Graham put the Graham Arms on the crossroads as its coaching inn, for travellers and the mail going up to Edinburgh over the toll bridge, and among the regular passengers on the coach south was Esk salmon. The Graham Arms was the point of the place, and the Globe was the other pub, with references back to 1783. Mike Tuer's records describe the Tavern as the part of the old Globe that is still open.

The scheme covered roughly five hundred square miles either side of the Solway, from Maryport in the south-west to Longtown on its northern edge and across the border to Gretna and Annan. Longtown got the sharpest end of it. The last town before the border stood between the Gretna munitions works and a city where drink was being rationed, and the answer was to stop the trade altogether. From mid-December 1916 until the autumn of 1917 the town was under outright prohibition. Not restricted. Closed. Carlisle got disinterested management and model pubs; Longtown got nothing at all for the best part of a year.

It left a mark on the town's inns. The White Swan and the Wheatsheaf, both trading from about 1790, were closed by the Board in 1917. Three older houses went for compensation in 1909: the George & Dragon, first recorded in 1732, the Marquis of Granby and the Scotch Arms. The Globe, kept by Mrs Graham in 1811 and John Boustead in 1832, was among the town's three best houses by the police's count that year.

What the Board did with the Globe was rebuild it almost entirely. The listing records houses and stables of probably the early nineteenth century with extensive alterations dated 5 October 1916, and the new pub went round two sides of a small square bowling green on an L-shaped plan.

The long single-storey range was the beer hall, with the bar at one end, an inglenook and gallery at the other and two fires in each long wall. The gallery was probably for musicians: a cinematograph was considered for the hall and music chosen instead. The two-storey wing held a refreshment room for teas and food, used by women as well as men, and a billiards and reading room upstairs reached by outside stone steps. The interior is thought to be by Voysey, designer to the Central Control Board for its early pubs.

Historic England's survey dates the opening to 21 June 1917, which would put it a few months before the town's prohibition ended, with Lord Lonsdale doing the honours and other Longtown pubs closing as a result. The shops on the street front were let, with the manager's flat above them. Not everyone was won over. A few of the Public House Committee who inspected it in 1918 'liked this place as a place, but thought it was unsuitable for Longtown, and that too much money had been spent on it.' The green proved too small for bowls. Arthur Sherwell was still suggesting 'a people's institute with a cinema' in 1923.

The town around it changed. The auction mart opened on the north bank of the Esk in 1926 and became the largest sheep market in England, which is what a Longtown pub trades on. In 1954 part of the Globe was the local school canteen, and alterations in 1970 added a brick extension behind the hall. The 1972 sale particulars list a lounge, public bar, meeting room, first-floor function room, off-sales shop and a large garden, and the building was listed Grade II, as the Globe Tavern on Bank Street, on 19 June 1973. In 2001 the mart was at the centre of the foot-and-mouth outbreak, which emptied the town's trade in a way the 1916 prohibition would have recognised.

By 2016 the pub was up for sale. Historic England's survey found the hall still one room open to the roof timbers, its walls painted stone as designed, with the old refreshment room's counter on its original side. The fireplaces had gone, the staff room and store had been knocked into a pool room, and partitions at either end of the hall had done away with both the bar counter and the inglenook, which the listing had singled out, with its minstrel gallery, as all that remained of the Voysey interior. The pub reopened in late 2017.

Today it is a locals' bar with sport, a pool table, darts and a big enclosed garden. No frills and no real ale, but a function room, karaoke and DJs: a good honest pub full of characters, as one regular put it.