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THE CARLISLE EXPERIMENT In 1918, the State, under the Central Control Board nationalised all of the pubs in Carlisle and the surrounding area (Figure 2). Dubbed the ‘Carlisle Experiment’, what began as an intervention to control unruly drinking around munitions factories became a far greater progressive campaign to transform England’s social space. The project, under the influence of the Temperance movement, set about reforming the public house from the Victorian ‘gin palaces’ of alcohol consumption, to what was deemed a more inclusive and proper venue of leisure, a model that was then copied by breweries across the whole country. 6
The Carlisle Experiment was born from the construction of the vast H.M. Factory in Gretna, stretching 9 miles and operated by over 12,000 predominantly female workers 8. Such a large influx of people meant that housing needed to be built quickly and two temporary ‘wooden townships’ at Gretna and Eastriggs gave way to permanent housing (Figure 1) designed by the Garden City architect Raymond Unwin. Unwin saw this as an opportunity to build generous workers housing and to consolidate the improvement of living conditions through the Garden City movement.
