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The State Management Scheme

When the government ran Carlisle's pubs

For 57 years the pubs in this city were owned by the state, and not by the council but by the government in London. 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 had already put it about as bluntly as it can be put, in a speech at Bangor in February 1915, while he was still Chancellor of the Exchequer: the country, he said, was fighting "Germany, Austria and drink", and drink was the worst of the three. By May he was Minister of Munitions, and the shells were his problem.

Historic England's survey puts a figure and a name to it. Convictions went from about 250 a year before the war to almost 1,000 by 1916, with the police thinned out by men gone to the front. Evening-shift workers were said to bribe the train driver to get them into Carlisle well before closing, and Boustead's Red Lion on Botchergate, one of the nearest bars to the station, lined hundreds of whiskies up along its counters ready for the train. It was said you could swing from the door of one Carlisle pub to the door of the next, and a good many of them were kept by elderly landlords or widows.

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. Over the next two years 53 of Carlisle's 118 pubs were shut outright, and the surviving 65 were run directly by the state. The Board's own report for 1920 counts licences rather than pubs and gets a slightly different answer: Carlisle had 119 in July 1916 and 69 at the end of 1920, and the whole area 340, of which 123 had been suppressed. The houses in side streets, lanes and alleys went first, 'whether or not a large trade was done at them'. The first pub the state opened itself was 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. It had bought pubs before, at Enfield that January, but those were existing houses it took over. Six licences in the city were closed the same day the Gretna opened. H. B. Wilson's official history has the first existing house coming under management on 24 July, and the rest following one at a time until 3 November.

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 rules went well beyond rounds. The long pull, a landlord's trick of pouring generous measures to win custom, was banned. Each house got a ration of drink for each opening, spirits could only be sold at certain times and on certain days, and the manager earned a bonus on food and soft drinks and nothing extra on beer. Every advert came off every pub, inside and out, sometimes by painting or boarding over the front, which is how the Howard Arms lost its tiles until 1979. Seats went in and bar counters were shortened, against what the temperance men called perpendicular drinking. Ordering 'a heater and a cooler', a spirit and a beer together, was forbidden. No spirits went to anyone who looked under eighteen, a Carlisle rule that the rest of the country copied in an Act of 1923. And from February 1917 no spirits were sold on a Saturday at all, after the Advisory Committee asked for it: arrests for drunkenness fell from about five and a half a Saturday to about one every other week.

Of the city's four breweries the state kept one. It took the Old Brewery, founded in 1756, on 1 August 1916, the New Brewery on the 18th, Iredale's on the 25th and the Queen's Brewery on 7 September, and stopped brewing at the last three straight away. Maryport Brewery followed late in 1916: it owned so many Carlisle pubs that selling them to the Board left it in difficulties, and the Board took the rest of its estate the next year. Across the district the register of houses taken over counts about 138 of 321 licensed premises shut by 1919, and by 1929 the 321 were down to 193 still open.

The local papers followed it week by week. By 21 October 1916 the Cumberland News could report 91 of the city's fully licensed houses taken over, fifteen closed and three grocers' licences taken away, 109 of the 117 licences in Carlisle. Grocers could no longer sell drink at all, and from November the off sale of spirits was to be confined to seventeen centres across the city, among them the Market Tavern, the Linton Holme and the Milbourne Arms. When spirits ran short in March 1918, anyone buying a bottle had to fill in a form giving a name and address and certifying it was for consumption in the Carlisle area, because spirits bought in the city were leaving it. Sunday closing covered the whole controlled area, which Sir Robert Allison, vice-chairman of the Board's local committee, called 'a thing which seemed almost beyond their hopes and expectations'. In the old days, he said, publicans had been licensed victuallers, but 'it was all licence and no victuals'. By 1921 Carlisle had 11.98 on-licences for every 10,000 people, against 20.45 in 1915, and the scheme's report for the year to March 1922 conceded that closing more now depended on building better pubs.

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. They were light, roomy and food-serving, built to discourage drinking on your feet and to be somewhere a woman might reasonably go. He had an assistant, George Walton, from the start; the scheme even had its own badge, designed by C. F. A. Voysey, another Arts and Crafts architect of the same generation.

Historic England's survey dates the appointment a little earlier, to the autumn of 1915, when he was assistant director of the Civic Survey of Greater London, and makes him chief architect for the Scottish districts too. He had never designed a pub. He stayed until September 1949, retiring at 88, and in all those years he never went to an opening. Asked to the Cumberland Inn's, he wrote back: 'By all means have a flare-up for the opening but of your charity forgive my not being present. As you know, I have always made it a rule to exempt myself on these dreadful occasions'.

He was not a civil service draughtsman who fell into pubs. He lived from 1861 to 1950, and before the war was known for Arts and Crafts houses in Cambridge, among them Conduit Head, Longfield and Bredon House, built for university dons. The scheme then handed a man of that standing a free hand over an entire city's pubs for twenty years, which is an unrepeatable commission and the reason the buildings are as good as they are.

The count is reconcilable, and the listing for the Redfern Inn is what does it. That building is described as the sixteenth and last public house built before the Second World War under the scheme, and it is the one Redfern did not design, his assistant Joseph Seddon taking it on when Redfern's health failed. Sixteen built, fifteen of them Redfern's, and the fourteen and fifteen that appear elsewhere in print are people counting slightly different things. Around eighty-seven existing pubs were substantially remodelled on top of that.

He worked almost entirely in the Arts and Crafts manner. Only one of his buildings for the scheme was modern in style: the Earl Grey of 1935 on Botchergate, Art Deco, opened on 9 July, and a martial arts centre now.

The ideas travelled well beyond the city. A light, food-serving, easily supervised pub aimed as much at women as at men shaped interwar roadhouses across the country, and can still be read in what a Wetherspoon looks like today.

The government's own inquiries agreed. The Royal Commission on Licensing, reporting in 1932, found the scheme's new and rebuilt houses 'generally speaking, models of public house construction', and added: 'We doubt whether, anywhere else in the country, so uniformly high a standard has been reached'. Its Scottish counterpart had reported the year before that the scheme's Scottish pubs were no better than private ones, and recommended shutting that half down.

He signed his work quietly. In the Cumberland Inn on Botchergate, look at the stained glass upstairs: three red fern leaves, and a bell for J & R Bell who built it.

Redfern's team

He did not work alone, and he picked his people with care. George Walton was in Carlisle from 1916 until about 1921, surveying the old pubs and designing interiors and signs. It was Walton who chose battleship grey for the Gretna Tavern, which went down so badly the rooms were repainted pink, and custom picked up. Basil Oliver, whose 1947 book is how anyone now knows what these pubs were meant to look like, worked under Redfern and Walton as what he called a local architectural assistant. Ernest Streatfield was clerk of works from 1919 and was still at it for the Home Office after Redfern retired.

Voysey's work went beyond the badge: he drew posters and framed pictures for the Board's pubs, one of them called Use and Beauty. For painted rooms, stencilling and signs in the thirties Redfern nearly always wanted Ernest Dinkel, and called him and his wife Kathleen 'Brilliant young people!'. Twelve of Dinkel's signs were in the Inn Signs Exhibition at the Building Centre in London in 1936, by Historic England's date; Wilson's official history puts the national exhibition of signs in 1937. Redfern had less faith in students. When the Carlisle School of Art painted the Golden Apples of the Hesperides in the Apple Tree's men's first-class room, he wrote that he had 'always been fearful of entrusting half educated amateurs with tasks which are far beyond their knowledge or their power'. The murals were still on the wall in 2016.

Signs were the one thing the scheme loosened. The Board had allowed a pub nothing but a small board with its name. Under the State Management Scheme Redfern brought in painted signs and argued over every one: at the Crown in Stanwix he wanted a coin, where others thought a royal crown more traditional. The Apple Tree's, by James Henry Sexton, came down in 1927 because it hung over the pavement against a city by-law. By 2018 not one surviving scheme pub still had its original sign. Tullie House keeps three: the Apple Tree's, the Irish Gate Tavern's and a Rose and Crown's, very likely Upperby's.

How a pub was taken over

The best picture of it is Sir Edgar Sanders' own notes of April and May 1917, kept in an annex to the official history that was marked for official eyes only. Sanders, the Board's general manager in Carlisle, went to see the Irvings at the Plough at Wreay. Beer restrictions were cutting their supply to a third of what it had been in 1916, and their summer tea trade kept them going, so he offered 17s 6d a week plus commission on food and minerals. Mr Irving was 'very indignant' and refused to hand over until his lease ran out. Sanders told him that was 'a ridiculous attitude to take up', since the Board could take control ten days after serving a statutory notice. The Irvings came back asking for 25s; Sanders 'was not going to bargain'. A week later Irving took the 17s 6d. He was going to Bristol, and Mrs Irving stayed on as manager, asking only who would supply the soap and cloths. The official historian's verdict on Sanders was that his dealings with the Irvings 'do not perhaps fall into the category of negotiation'.

That was the usual pattern. The Board's 1920 report says that in almost every case the old tenant, once compensated, was offered the chance to stay on as manager, and most did. Not all went quietly. A Board memo of 1919 lists the compensation still unsettled. The tenant of the Shakespeare Tavern wrote an abusive letter to Lord D'Abernon himself in July 1916 and turned down £30, though the house did so little trade that he was making practically no profit. At the Jovial Sailor Mr Forster refused £220 and handed over the keys only when threatened with an action for ejectment. Mr Graham of the Queen's Brewery would not negotiate at all, apparently expecting his houses back when the Board was wound up, and the owners of the Golden Lion on Botchergate went to court claiming over £20,000, twice the valuer's best offer.

The state left almost no mark on the names. Wilson could find only one 'overt link' to the scheme in the name of any of its pubs: the Board Inn, 'situated appropriately opposite the General Manager's' office in Castle Street.

Between the wars

Sanders called the policy 'fewer and better', a phrase from his report of 1918 that outlived him in the trade: in 1932 he became the first director of the Brewers' Society. After him the general managers were career civil servants, two from the Board's own staff, one from the Post Office, two promoted from the Carlisle office, one from Customs and Excise and the last, J. H. Marker, from the Board of Trade in 1969. F. S. Stewart, his assistant at the end, had joined as a boy clerk of fourteen in 1927.

Beer was 5d, 6d and 7d a pint, and the scheme blended its own whisky, Border Blend. In the 1930s a cheap fourpenny beer for West Cumberland, where the scheme had to compete with private brewers, drew a Home Office letter to the general manager which, as an official remembered it long after, said 'The Secretary of State does not like your fourpenny beer'. Sir John Gilmour's objection was not to the beer, 'which must have been a fairly watery brew', but to complaints that the state was undercutting the trade. The Treasury had already refused, in 1922, £100,000 to 'round off the ragged edges' of the monopoly towards Maryport. Profits fell in the slump to £70,000 by 1939, then passed £198,000 in the war. The scheme did the catering for the Carlisle Historical Pageant of August 1928.

How a manager was judged mattered more than any rule. Asked in 1930 whether a man could lose his job for selling too much, the general manager, A. E. Mitchell, replied that 'no one can remember any manager being dismissed solely on account of an appreciable increase in the sale of intoxicants'. An unexplained rise was more likely to be read as serving after hours. Country trade was falling anyway, he added, with unemployment and 'the motor omnibus services'. In 1941 Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary, asked his officials to prepare a case for 'extending State Liquor Carlisle etc Scheme all over' the country. They found no grounds, and he let it drop.

The collar on the pint

The scandal of the scheme's later years was about the head on the beer. In 1956 the Civil Service Union alleged that managers were being pushed into giving short measure. A barrister, Mr Burt QC, held an inquiry and reported in April 1957 that there was no such pressure, but he confirmed what the trade called the 'natural surplus': the beer saved by the froth. In 1958 stock checks led to ten managers being convicted of fraud and dismissed, and of eight more charged with persistent shortfalls, six were dismissed. Carlisle's MP, Dr Donald Johnson, raised the case in the Commons on 30 June 1959, and the Home Secretary refused to reopen it.

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. The Licensing (Abolition of State Management) Act received Royal Assent on 27 July 1971, and Edward Heath's government sold the lot: most of the pubs in four big groups, which went to Greenall Whitley, Scottish & Newcastle and John Smith's, and the rest one at a time, with tenders closing on 13 November 1972. Who bought which pub, and for how much, is its own page. So is what came after: when the local CAMRA branch was founded in February 1976, only two pubs in the city still sold cask beer. The smaller houses were offered first to their own managers: forty country pubs in late 1972, then a run of city ones, the first of them the Woolpack. A Cumberland News reader's letter of 20 February 2009 puts the whole span more plainly than any Act of Parliament: the scheme's "final closure date... finished in 1973, although closure bill 1971". The two-year gap between the law and the last sale is why this site dates the scheme 1916 to 1973 rather than stopping at the Act. Throughout its life the scheme turned a profit: it started with £0.5m of Treasury money, repaid by 1928, and had generated £6.7m in cumulative profits by the time it was wound up. The scheme's own papers put the start-up money higher: the annual report for 1929 has Exchequer advances peaking at £661,665 in March 1919 and repaid in 1927-28, and Wilson's history has over £835,000 tied up in the Carlisle undertaking by March 1918, with the capital fixed at £732,000 once the debt was cleared.

The end had been under discussion for a decade. A working party under E. H. Gwynn, appointed in 1960, was asked how state management could be wound up. The Conservative government of the day planned to abolish the Scottish schemes, but 'would not abolish the Carlisle scheme as it was popular locally'. Early in 1970 a Treasury paper on hiving it off reached Harold Wilson, who did not want any change, and asked that the decision be 'expressed in the passive mood and not attributed to him'. In January 1970 Lord Hailsham, then shadow Home Secretary, had suggested handing the scheme to 'a suitably constituted local body', such as a trust. Labour quoted that back at the government in 1971. By then it was settled: in August 1970 Edward Heath had written, 'If we are going to do this, as I think we should, we had better get it out of the way quickly.'

The Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, announced the end on 19 January 1971: there was 'no longer sufficient social or economic justification'. In the Commons that April he was blunter. 'No one could reasonably suggest that there is any risk there today of outbursts of drunkenness promoted by publicans.' Trading stopped at Cromarty in June 1972, at Gretna in March 1973 and in Carlisle on 31 August 1973. What went up for sale in Carlisle was 107 pubs, 12 hotels, the brewery, the maltings and the offices. On 9 February the City Council 'accepted' the decision, asking only that the brewery and its staff be kept and no new monopoly created, and the bill passed its Second Reading on 20 April by 277 votes to 226. At the start of that year the scheme as a whole owned 146 pubs, 11 hotels and 11 off-licences, and employed 1,165 people, 458 of them full time.

Before the state: the coffee tavern

The scheme did not invent the idea that working people should have somewhere to go that was not a pub. Denton Holme has a Grade II listed building called the former Holme Head Coffee Tavern and Reading Room, put up beside Ferguson Brothers' mill. A coffee tavern was a Victorian temperance venture: the fittings and the sociability of a public house with the drink taken out, usually paid for by an employer or a philanthropist who would rather his workforce read a newspaper than have a pint.

It is worth knowing about because the scheme's food taverns were the same argument thirty years later, made by a government instead of a mill owner and with the beer left in. The coffee tavern tried to replace the pub. The state decided to run it instead. Only one of those approaches produced buildings people still drink in.

The food taverns

The clearest account of what the scheme was actually doing comes from a book published while it was still doing it. The Control of the Drink Trade, Longmans Green, 1919, explains at pages 216 and 217 that labour shortages during the war limited how much rebuilding was possible, so the houses chosen for the earliest reconstruction were the ones where a trade in food looked most likely to develop.

Seven food taverns opened in 1917 and 1918: the Gretna, the London, the Pheasant, the Irish Gate, the Citadel, the Albion and the Goliah. And the point is made firmly that none of this added a single licence. In two cases the rebuilding allowed a neighbouring pub to be closed.

The Board's own report for 1920 dates the Gretna earlier, to July 1916, which is when this site has it opening, and counts eight food taverns in the city by the end of 1920, with a ninth being rebuilt. They served about 570,000 meals that year, and the country inns' tea rooms over 45,000 more. Some of the trade was off-sales of food, where 'people, and especially children, bring their own basins and plates for soups, puddings, pies and the like', which the report called a great boon in the poorer streets, where the mother of a family was often out at work all day. For the shift trains a coffee cart stood outside the station from ten at night until seven in the morning.

Each was pitched at its own district. The Pheasant in Caldewgate stood opposite a biscuit factory employing large numbers of women, so it got a cookshop for takeaway trade with its own side-street door, and upstairs, reached separately and with no way through to the bar, a café selling no alcohol at all and a rest room for the factory women. The Irish Gate had a dining room and a cookshop, again with entrances away from the liquor bar. The Citadel, by the station, ran a restaurant and an upstairs café and did most of its business with commercial and professional customers. The Albion had a first-floor dining room. The Goliah, in one of the poorest parts of the city, was given a cookshop for what the book calls an outdoor trade in food.

Takeaway food, sold by the state, in 1917, aimed at the district that needed it most. Set against the architecture, it is the part of the scheme that reads best a century later.

Men's bars and women's rooms

The public bar was for men. Women were not turned away, since so many of the munitions workers were women, but a woman on her own was discouraged. The idea was that she came with a man and sat in the rooms meant for her: a mixed smoking room, or a women's room like the one fitted into the Joiners Arms in 1916 for the women from the biscuit factory. Historic England call this a northern habit, and it lasted longer here than in the south. Children under fourteen were allowed only in rooms serving food and not drink. Dominoes and draughts were everywhere, gambling nowhere, and the staff watched the games. A manager could take the dominoes away altogether when a house was too full to watch.

The women's bars that came later had a practical reason. In those years no respectable woman would be seen in a public bar, so a woman on her own had to sit in the smoke room and pay smoke-room prices. A bar of her own let her drink at public-bar prices. In 1923 the scheme's reply to a prohibitionist who said it had drawn women into the pubs was blunt: 'Women were drinking in Carlisle public houses before the Control Board came here', and the women's bars at the Earl Grey and the Kings Head were crowded on Saturday nights. He defended the barmaids too: 'a good barmaid is at least as good in keeping order as a good barman'.

It unwound slowly. A survey in 1954 found only three customers in four sitting down, and the scheme stopped insisting. By 1966 the Friars Tavern was the only house left that was men only throughout, and in 1967 the Local Advisory Committee conceded that 'the social habits were changing' and customers would now accept mixed company in bars once kept for men. A Home Office minister, Alice Bacon, said in the scheme's jubilee supplement of October 1966 that 'as a matter of personal opinion I would agree that the distinction is archaic'. The monopoly softened too: in 1957 the Carrow House Hotel, south of the city, became the first private establishment in the scheme's history to get a licence, and it got it against the advice of the Local Advisory Committee, on a split vote of the council that ran the scheme from London. Beer mats and labelled bottles came in the fifties, other brewers' beer from 1960 and cans from 1966.

What the temperance men made of it

The temperance movement was not one camp, and it split over Carlisle. The prohibitionists hated the scheme, because it put the state in the business of selling drink. Peter Chalmers, a Glasgow prohibitionist, wrote attack after attack, claiming among other things that the St Nicholas Arms had been opened against the wishes of the vicar and served no food. A prohibitionist worker spent at least a week sitting in the Gretna Tavern collecting stories. Philip Snowden, using figures from a Birmingham prohibitionist, claimed Carlisle was more drunken than 170 other towns in England, and the Labour Party conference at Scarborough in June 1920 threw out state purchase in favour of local option. Snowden later admitted that, given the choice between private licensing and public ownership, he would 'decidedly prefer' the latter.

The moderate reformers were the scheme's best friends. The Temperance Legislation League, chaired by Seebohm Rowntree, with Arthur Sherwell as its expert on Carlisle, answered every attack. Their figures were the police's. Convictions for drunkenness in the city ran at about 250 a year before the war: 275 in 1914, 277 in 1915, 953 in 1916 with the Gretna navvies, then 320 in 1917, 80 in 1918 and 78 in 1919. The Chief Constable put the sobriety down almost entirely to managers who had no interest in how much drink they sold. In November 1919 a conference of trade union delegates for some 15,000 workers voted by over 200 votes to one to keep the scheme and extend it to the whole country, and in December 80% of the city's Anglican clergy and all its Nonconformist ministers signed a memorial in support. The Rev. G. Bramwell Evens, a Methodist minister in Carlisle from 1914 to 1926, later known to radio listeners as Romany, wanted prohibition in the end and backed the scheme strongly all the same. The Dean of Carlisle told the Royal Commission that 25 of 40 local incumbents were 'quite definitely favourable'.

Locally the argument was louder. In October 1916 the president of the Licensed Victuallers' Defence League told its council that his experience of Carlisle had shown him 'how cruel, tyrannical, and unjust' the Board's policy was. The Cumberland News backed the experiment while admitting that 'the Board have not been happy in all their methods', and in May 1917 quoted the Rev. D. E. Davies on how the Board's operations struck the middle-class citizen who did not use pubs: 'what appears to be the frightful waste of material and labour'. In November 1922 Colonel Claude Lowther, standing for Parliament, called the Board's new houses 'iniquitous dens' after touring some of them one Saturday night, and refused to say which. G. A. Rimington, chairman of the Advisory Committee, answered with the police figures: 84 convictions for drunkenness in the first ten months of 1922, against 241 in the same months of 1914.

The League's people were not always welcome. During a League conference at the end of September 1935 three of its members went round the scheme's houses on their own, and one of them, Mr Herron, had Mrs Lang, the manageress of the Blue Bell at Dalston, fetched to the Central Hotel on a busy Saturday evening, by a message to Dalston post office since the pub had no telephone, to tell the delegates what she thought of the scheme. The general manager, A. E. Mitchell, wrote that 'we have nothing whatever to be ashamed of' and that the three would not be welcome in Carlisle so long as he was general manager. Apologies followed.

Why Botchergate

Half of what the scheme took over, and a good deal of what Carlisle drinks in now, stands on one street, and the reason is four hundred years older than the scheme. Botchergate lay outside the walls, and the gates were shut after dark under an ordinance of Elizabeth I. Hostelries grew up on the wrong side of the wall to take in travellers who arrived late.

Two of Redfern's pubs are on it. There are forty-two venues on this site along its length, still trading or long gone. The whole story of the street is here.

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. That is the accurate claim, and the better one anyway.

Historic England's survey counts four pubs at Enfield rather than five, the Greyhound, the Royal Small Arms, the Ordnance Arms and the Swan and Pike, taken in January and February 1916, and has them back in private hands in 1923, the year after that scheme was wound up. Carlisle was the one the Board's chairman, Lord D'Abernon, called his 'model farm'.

And it very nearly spread. A Licensing Act of 1949 let the scheme open pubs in the new towns, and three were designed for it: the Essex Skipper at Harlow, the New Venture at Hemel Hempstead and the Twin Foxes at Stevenage, opening between November 1952 and May 1953. A dozen more were in the pipeline when the Conservatives came in, and an Act of 1952 ended state management in the new towns and passed the pubs to private brewers.

The three oldest

Carlisle has three pubs with a claim to being its oldest, and they're measuring different things. The Sportsman is the oldest recorded: first documented in 1770, though the pub itself claims 1747, and standing on the Blackfriars friary. The Joiners Arms was first recorded on 20 September 1785 but may have been trading from around 1745, which would make it older still. And the Kings Head claims the oldest ground, though the building itself went up as a family house in about 1784 and only became the Kings Head in 1829. All three were State Management pubs. One of them, the Joiners, has been shut since December 2024 and is advertised for sale.

None of the three is among the inns a Carlisle history of 1794 names for travellers. Those were the Bush, the Crown and Mitre, the King's Arms, the Grapes, the Blue Bell and the Duke's Head, and only the Crown and Mitre is still pulling pints. Carlisle's inns in 1794 has them, with the town plan of that year.

First and last

The whole arc is still standing, and you can drink in both ends of it. The Apple Tree was among the first four pubs taken over in July 1916, and the state then knocked it down and rebuilt it as the first purpose-built model inn of the scheme. The Reiver (the Border Reiver as was) was the last pub the scheme ever opened, in July 1971, built for west-end estates that had no pub at all. It opened the same year the government announced it was selling the lot, and lasted under two years in state hands.

In between you can watch the thing change character. Redfern's Arts and Crafts model inns in the twenties and thirties; plainer estate pubs after the war, culminating in the Royal Scot of 1960, designed by the Home Office's own chief architect and built by Laing. Thirty-three years from a craftsman's pub to a government building.

After Redfern

When Redfern retired the scheme did not replace him. The work went to a small team at the Home Office in London: John Wallace Williamson as chief architect from 1949, then Henry Metayers from 1956, who designed the Royal Scot, then Alfred Ball and R A Greaves. Their first new pub, the Bounty at Netherton near Maryport in 1952, began as a Redfern design of 1948, cut down to save money. For bigger jobs they hired a London firm, Douglas Reed and Son, who worked on the Arroyo, the Border Terrier and the Border Reiver, which opened on 23 July 1971, four days before the Act that abolished the scheme.

They had to learn it all again. The first post-war smoking rooms got plain wooden seats, and the scheme's superintendent pointed out that it had made that mistake once already, in 1916: 'men and women will not sit in smoking rooms on plain wooden seats'. In 1968 the general manager in Carlisle complained that architects in London caused endless delays, and held up the Crown at Wetheral as a job badly planned and badly furnished. From November 1969 he could hire local architects himself, for jobs up to £1,200.

Harry Redfern's pubs

Redfern (1861-1950) was the scheme's architect, and the reason it left a mark you can still walk into. Fifteen of the sixteen New Model Inns the scheme built before the war are his; the sixteenth and last, the Redfern Inn, was his assistant Joseph Seddon's work, built while Redfern's health was failing and named in his honour. Across the scheme's whole life, from 1916 to 1973, Historic England count twenty-seven pubs built new, two of them designed by Redfern during the war itself. Beyond Carlisle he worked at Oxford and Cambridge, on college restorations and university laboratories.

He both built new and reworked old. These are the ones on this site, including two that are no longer pubs at all. His work outlived its use in both cases, and both buildings are still standing.

Built new

Remodelled an existing pub

Named after him, designed by Joseph Seddon

Three kinds of survival

Three of Redfern's pubs are held up as the great survivals, and they're not the same thing at all. The Cumberland Inn on Botchergate is the least altered, with original fabric, and it sits on CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors. Its panelled walls carry gilded inscriptions in praise of moderate drinking, which is the argument of the entire scheme written out in gold leaf on the wall of a pub. The Redfern at Kingmoor is the best preserved, its plan still legible room by room. And the Magpie at Botcherby is a faithful 2010 recreation of an interior that had already gone; CAMRA are explicit that it's a replica. Original, preserved, rebuilt. Worth knowing which is which.

What became of them

Historic England reckon the scheme acquired or built 417 licensed houses in its 57 years, 363 in England and 54 in Scotland, counting the ones it shut. By 2018, 83 had been demolished and 103 were still pubs. The rest had found other lives: 127 were homes, which was easy, since nearly every one came with a manager's flat upstairs; 37 were shops and other businesses, 32 hotels or guest houses, 11 cafés or restaurants and 9 clubs. One was a probation hostel, one a museum, and one a bank: Lloyds on Lowther Street, in part of the old Gretna Tavern, where the whole thing started.

Of the 27 pubs the scheme built new, 8 are listed, and 7 of those are Redfern's. Four were listed in 1973, while the scheme was being sold, after the Carlisle Civic Trust appealed to the Secretary of State for fear of what private owners would do to them: the Globe at Longtown, the Crescent, the Horse and Farrier and the Spinners Arms. The Apple Tree followed in 1997, the Cumberland Inn and the Redfern in 2000 and the Magpie in 2011. None of the post-war pubs had even been assessed by 2018. Across everything the scheme touched, 93 of the buildings still standing are listed, nearly all for what they were before the state arrived.

The bowling greens

Games and fresh air were meant to be the alternative to standing at the bar, so the scheme's pubs got bowling greens. Redfern's first was at the Horse & Farrier in 1929, and most of his suburban houses followed; the scheme was still laying them at the Inglewood Forest Inn in 1953. Few survive. When Historic England surveyed the scheme's pubs in 2014-16 they found four: the Magpie's, the Horse & Farrier's, the Redfern's, which has since gone out of use with housing approved on it, and a small one at the Globe in Longtown that was never really big enough to play on. The Turf's went under a car park, the Apple Tree's and the Near Boot's are gone, and the Rose & Crown at Upperby went with the pub. The Magpie's was the last still played on, a crown green, though the pub itself has been shut since January 2026.

At its height the scheme had thirteen bowling greens and two putting greens, and a bowls league from the 1930s. Darts, Wilson says, 'did not come into their own until the early '50s', and the delay was London's: it was the old central office, not the managers in Carlisle, that had been obstructive about the game. Once it caught on it caught on hard. The State Management Darts League, founded by David Stringer in 1951, had 57 pubs in five divisions and over a thousand members by 1966, and claimed to be the biggest in the country.

Pubs you can still drink in

These are the places on this site with a confirmed connection to the scheme, some built for it and 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

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