CarlislePubs

The State Management Scheme

When the government ran Carlisle's pubs

For 57 years the pubs in this city were owned by the state. Not the council — the government. Several are still serving, and you can walk to them tonight.

Why it happened

In November 1915 work began on an enormous cordite factory straddling the border at Gretna, nine miles long. Around 12,000 munitions workers arrived, plus thousands of builders and a military guard — into a city whose own population was about 50,000. They were unusually well paid, billeted a short train ride away, and had very little else to do of an evening.

Carlisle's pubs were swamped and convictions for drunkenness climbed sharply. The government's concern wasn't public health, it was shell production. Lloyd George, then Minister of Munitions, put it about as bluntly as it can be put: the country, he said, was fighting "Germany, Austria and drink" — and drink was the worst of the three.

What they actually did

A Central Control Board (Liquor Traffic) had been created in 1915. In June 1916 it was given the power to compulsorily buy licensed premises in Carlisle and district and run the drink trade itself.

It moved fast. By that October, 339 licensed premises and five breweries across 500 square miles had been taken over. In Carlisle, 53 of the city's 118 pubs were shut outright and the surviving 65 were run directly by the state. The first state-owned pub in the country opened on Lowther Street on 12 July 1916 — the Gretna Tavern, converted from Carlisle's main post office, with the old sorting office turned into a dining hall.

The guiding idea was "disinterested management": whoever was behind the bar drew a salary and had nothing to gain from selling you another one. Beer was weakened, prices went up, and from 1916 to 1919 buying rounds was banned outright. Food was pushed hard, along with games and reading rooms — anything that might keep a man in a chair rather than stood at the bar.

The buildings

Harry Redfern was appointed the scheme's architect in 1916, and this is where its real legacy sits. Through the interwar years he remodelled existing pubs and designed a series of New Model Inns — light, roomy, food-serving places built to discourage drinking on your feet and to be somewhere a woman might reasonably go. Fourteen were built to his designs.

He signed his work quietly. In the Cumberland Inn on Botchergate, look at the stained glass: three red fern leaves.

How it ended

It was meant to be a wartime measure. It lasted until 1973. The Central Control Board was wound up in 1921, but the Carlisle and District State Management Scheme carried on under the Home Office, through another world war and beyond. Edward Heath's government privatised it in 1971 and the assets went under the hammer in six lots, mostly to established brewers.

One thing people get wrong

Carlisle is often called the only place in Britain where this happened. Not quite. There were three schemes — Carlisle and Gretna, the Cromarty Firth, and Enfield, where the state bought five pubs near the Royal Small Arms Factory in January 1916. Enfield's were sold back in 1922. Carlisle's was by far the largest and outlived the others by half a century, which is the accurate claim and a better one anyway.

Pubs you can still drink in

These are the places on this site with a confirmed connection to the scheme — some built for it, some taken into it.

Others are suspected but unconfirmed — they stay off this list until there's a source behind them. Know one that's missing? Tell us.

Where this comes from

Spotted an error? This page especially — let us know and it gets fixed.