Year by year
Carlisle pubs through the years
Drag the slider. Gold pins are pubs still trading today. Red pins are ones that were open in that year and have since gone.
Why they cluster where they do
Watch Botchergate as you drag the slider. Pubs pile up along it in every decade, because it lay outside the city walls, where travellers locked out after dark found a bed and a drink, and it is still where the city goes out. The street's story, and every pub on it.
The other clusters have their own reasons. Rickergate and Caldewgate were dense working districts the State Management Scheme thinned out after 1916, and the ring of pubs on the outer edge is the interwar estates, each built with a model pub of its own.
Before the directories
The slider starts in 1790, but the 1790s map is thin, and not because Carlisle was short of inns. A pub only appears from the first directory, newspaper or book that names it, and few did before 1800. The ones you see are the inns that turn up in eighteenth-century sources. Lay the 1794 town plan over the map to see the walled city they stood in; Carlisle's inns in 1794 has what a Carlisle man wrote about them that year.
A pub for every 180 people
Drag the slider to 1850 and the centre fills with pins, and that is no trick of the map. When Robert Rawlinson came to look at the city's drains for the General Board of Health in 1849, the Carlisle Temperance Association counted 116 public houses, 21 beer-shops, 18 wine and spirit merchants and three maltsters and brewers. His report set Carlisle beside eight other towns: with 145 public houses and spirit vaults for 26,000 people, one for every 180, it had more for its size than Bolton (one to 211), Hull (230), Liverpool (275) or Oldham (530). He put it down to the city's many fairs, when the streets filled with dealers, hawkers and vagrants as well as honest trade.
The same report has a plan of a single block in the middle of the city, between Fisher Street and Scotch Street, with every building lettered by what it was used for. Six inns are named in that one block, and a seventh is marked: the Plume of Feathers has the plan, and the pubs around it.
What this map can't show
Pins for lost pubs are placed from old descriptions. A few mark the site itself, but almost none of these buildings survive to be measured, so most pins mark the street and mean somewhere along here. Where a pub's earliest evidence is a directory entry or a census, that is the year it appears on this map, not the year it opened, and most of them were open for years before anyone wrote them down.