A Colpitts Conversation

By Isobel James

Everybody has a warm Colpitts memory: my favourite is the cheeky 20-minute Taddy that my housemate knocked back an hour before his train home, not yet packed but certainly a little tipsy. Kate’s, she tells me, is the Diamond Jubilee, when the Colpitts’ celebration blurred into the next-door street party – regulars and students in a back and forth from road to the bar. Rounding the corner, quite literally, into Hawthorn Terrace, this snug pub sits at the heart of Durham’s densest student area, offering a sense of home in our city of constant turnover.

We start in 1856, as Kate takes me through the Colpitts’ history. “It’s actually nothing to do with mining! It’s named after the Colpitts brothers and was a coaching inn. The pub used to be upstairs, and the six houses on Colpitts Terrace were all rooms where people stayed. The downstairs bit where everybody sits and enjoys a drink used to be the stables.”

Kate and Gary had never planned on becoming part of that story themselves. In August 2021, the pub closed for the first time. When Kate and Gary shook hands over a deal to apply as the new management — after a few too many ‘Turning Points’ at the Holy Grale — it had, Kate insists, “only been a joke. By October, the Colpitts power couple hit the ground running with its reopening, winning Community Pub of the Year just one month later. “Gary handles all the admin bits, and I’d been working in the library, so I was keen to try a slightly different set of skills by running the bar. The last bar work I’d done was in Klute in the 1980s! I remember thinking, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ but we had a lot of people who thought we were a bit mad to take it on and that’s what spurred us on.” The worst part, Kate recalls, was tending to the pub’s coal fire. At least, I told her, there’s a collective student appreciation for that: nothing beats rosy cheeks, an Alpine, and the Colpitts Scrabble board on a wintry day — the dreamiest escape from the no-bills-included student house/part-time fridge.

The Colpitts held so vividly in our Durham nostalgia only recently revived its student community, having been cash-only until 2023. “We really tried to turn the pub around and get to know the students. We’ve even been invited to a couple of parties,” Kate jokes. “We do dearly miss you all when you go off for summer! We’ve had three generations of students working with us now, and we keep their photos on the wall — just a little memory wall, to give them a little place in the pub.”

When you head into Colpitts, the flow of chatter around the bar is a sure sign of its steadfast community. Deeper in, it’s the photos and paintings on the walls that tell of their warmth. “Royston Thomas, who is a big photographer in the North East, superimposed the faces of some regulars onto paintings of Durham’s Prince Bishops. We have those framed, and that raised money for St. Cuthbert’s Hospice. It’s so well done that I didn’t even notice at first. I was cleaning them once and thought, ‘hold on!’ And then there’s our regular John Tierney — an amazing oil painter — who donated a bar scene of Colpitts with all the regulars around the bar. A lot of students ask about that one.” The community spills beyond the pub’s walls too, as Kate rejoices that a group of students joined their last mini-bus trip to Whitby.

Join their weekly Wednesday pub quiz and you might wonder why the pints at Colpitts taste just so good. The answer, Kate tells me, is the wooden casks, which are a Samuel Smith hallmark rare enough that the pub recently won an award from the Society for the Preservation of Beer from the Wood. Next time you’re in, keep your eyes open: every week, Gary hides a doll somewhere in the pub, and whoever finds it gets a free pint —which, really, is the Colpitts experience all over: kind, hearty, and never short of a laugh.

Image: Kate Page