Then
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, and the reason predates everything on this map. The street lay outside the city walls, and the gates were shut after dark under an ordinance of Elizabeth I, shutting out anyone who arrived late. Hostelries grew up on the wrong side of the wall to take them in. Four hundred years later it is still where the city goes out, and there are forty-one venues on this site along it. More on Botchergate.
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.
What this map can't show
Pins for lost pubs sit on the street, not the doorway. Almost none of these buildings survive to be measured, so a pin means 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.