City Centre, Carlisle

The William Rufus

—

The other Botchergate Wetherspoons, two minutes from the station. Busier and younger than the Woodrow Wilson, with a DJ and dancefloor at weekends. Open from eight for breakfast.

Part of J D Wetherspoon (Lloyds No. 1)

Today: See opening hours
Address: 10-16 Botchergate, Carlisle CA1 1QS
Phone: 01228 633160

Directions Ring them Their website

History

Opened October 2004

Opened: October 2004
Previously: Botchergate shops, a drapery, a grocer, a chemist
Named after: William II, 'Rufus', reigned 1087-1100

William II, known as Rufus, took the land of Carlisle in 1092, dispossessed the local ruler Dolfin, fortified the town and sent settlers north with women and livestock to work the land. The re-founding of Carlisle is traditionally his, and the pub named after him sits on a street named after the Flemish officer he handed it to. That story, and the rest of Botchergate's, is on its own page.

Both CAMRA and Wetherspoon describe him as the designer and builder of Carlisle Castle, which is generous. Rufus's castle was timber, a motte-and-bailey. Henry I ordered the stone one in 1122, and it was probably finished under the Scottish king David I after he took the town in 1135. Rufus founded it; other people built what you can see.

The pub itself is younger than its namesake by nine centuries. Wetherspoon knocked several Botchergate retail units together and opened it in October 2004, and it has no previous pub name because the frontage was never a pub. The shops it replaced were not nobodies. The listed facade of number 10 survives as part of the building and carried J. S. Hope's drapery. Next along, George White kept a long-standing grocery and Tom Ridley a chemist's, and both men were Mayor of Carlisle: White in 1898-99, Ridley in 1919-20. Two mayors, side by side, selling groceries and pills, and you can get a pint in both shops at once now.

It is not quite true to say nothing here was ever a pub, though. The ground at the back held a bar called Platform One, remembered well enough locally, and that site was turned into the beer garden in 2014. That is very likely the Railway Tavern on Collier Lane, which also traded as Platform 1 and had gone by about 1995, though nothing on record ties the two names together outright.

It is a Lloyds No. 1, Wetherspoon's slightly louder sub-brand: more music, later hours. Breakfast through to closing, families in during the day, noisy at weekends. It is the younger of two Wetherspoons on the street; the Woodrow Wilson opened six years earlier.