The KingsHead

The building is seventeenth-century and the site is said to have kept a hostelry since the tenth — a claim the guide passes on with the 'reputedly' it arrived with — but the documented line starts in 1829, when James Sawyer, a veteran of the Peninsular War and Waterloo, hung the King's Head sign. The pub passed through Carlisle's strange State Management era from 1916 and into brewery hands in 1973; the freehold sits with a multinational today, and what makes the listing is the man who holds the licence: Mike Vose, Carlisle born, has run it since June 2001, and the city's pub-of-the-year plaques — 2008 through 2013, 2015 through 2017, again in 2022 — accumulated on his watch. Long tenure is the truest form of independence a tied house can have.