The Underground

History

Opened

3 December 2021

On the site of

Concrete, 2004 to 2019

Founder

Jake Cabeza

A nightclub literally underneath Lowther Street, down the steps, in the cellars that were Concrete. Concrete is the thing to understand about the place. The University of Cumbria's own alumni page calls it the student night spot, located underneath the pavements of Lowther Street: multi-room and rabbit-warren-like, low ceilings, always packed, bouncy dance and indie. Anyone who was a student in Carlisle in the 2000s or 2010s ended up down there. It ran fifteen years and stopped trading on 11 May 2019, and it has its own entry in the lost pubs archive.

The Underground opened on Friday 3 December 2021 under Jake Cabeza, who took the old club meaning to build on the name it had. The opening night sold 250 tickets in ninety minutes. House music was the stated direction, Fridays and Saturdays to start with, and Tuesdays were under consideration after the success of Concrete's Teapot Tuesdays. Since then the promoters have widened it: Afrobeats, reggae and dancehall, amapiano, bass and rave nights, drum and bass, club classics.

Beyond that it is thinly documented: no published hours, no website, and the licensing register is most of the rest of the evidence. What the cellars were before Concrete is not recorded either, though they sit beside the old Gretna Tavern, the state's first pub, which by 1925 took in the buildings either side of number 8; whether these cellars were ever part of it is not settled.