Turf Tavern

History

Opened Built 1839-40 as a racecourse grandstand hotel

Built

1839-40, grandstand hotel for The Swifts racecourse

Extended

1874, by Daniel Birkett

Listed

Grade II, 22 March 1974

State-run

September 1916 to 1973

Privatised

Sold to Eden Construction Ltd, 1973

The Turf didn't start as a pub. It started as the grandstand hotel for Carlisle's racecourse, and it's the last thing left standing from it.

The course was the Swifts, on the low ground by the Eden, roughly where the Sands Centre and the open land around it are now. Racing in Carlisle goes back to the late sixteenth century. The Carlisle Bell, still run each June, is one of the oldest horse races in the world, with the earliest record dating to 1559 and a gold bell given by Lady Dacre. By 1773 the Swifts had two meetings a year, one of them a four-day festival, and in 1839 the grandstand went up to match; the Carlisle Journal reported it nearly finished in 1840. An early twentieth-century photograph shows the upper floor with large casement windows and a balcony, exactly what you'd build to watch horses from.

It was extended in 1874 by Daniel Birkett, the Carlisle and Liverpool architect who also designed the bank on Court Square that's now the Griffin. The interior has been altered plenty since, but Birkett's extension survives well, cast-iron columns and open timber roof trusses included, and the building has been Grade II listed since March 1974. In September 1897, still the Turf Hotel, its licence passed from Messrs Hope and Bendle to Mr Bendle alone, on a rearrangement of the firm.

Then the racing left. The ground drained badly, the city grew in around it leaving no room to expand, and the Duke of Devonshire declined to renew the lease. In 1904 the racecourse moved south to Blackwell on Durdar Road, where it still runs; its main restaurant is called the Swifts, which is the only other trace left. The grandstand hotel simply carried on as a pub, with a bowling green laid out on what had been the paddock. The ground it looks out over, old racecourse, then municipal golf course, now rewilded, is the course it was built to serve.

From September 1916, or August by Historic England's gazetteer, it was run by the State Management Scheme, and it stayed in government hands to the end, sold in 1973 to Eden Construction Ltd for £26,265, one of the last to go.

It was also the pub that brought real ale back to the city centre after the sale. Theakston had bought the scheme's old brewery in 1974 but had nowhere in Carlisle to sell its beer, and until November 1977 only three pubs in the city sold cask beer at all. That month the Turf's licensees, Brian and Betty, put Theakston Best Bitter on, the city's fourth real ale bar, and the local CAMRA newsletter announced that Carlisle could manage a pub crawl at last. The pair went on to run the Theakston on London Road and then the Beehive.

Being where it is, the flood risk is real. Storm Desmond shut it on 4 December 2015, and it didn't reopen until 16 April the following year.

And on which side of the river: the Turf is often put in Stanwix and it is not there. Stanwix is north of the Eden and the Turf is south of it, about five hundred yards from the Cross, on the low ground by the Sands where the racecourse was. Its CA1 postcode gives it away; every actual Stanwix pub is CA3.