Carlisle Living
Carlisle Living is a monthly lifestyle magazine for Carlisle and north Cumbria, published from the city by what is now Newsquest Cumbria Magazines. Launched by CN Group Magazines in October — with a launch date of 25 October reported at the time — it was created as the city-focused companion to the county magazine Cumbria Life, aimed at younger, urban and aspirational readers. Its strapline in recent years, displayed on its own site, is Celebrating our city, and its contents span fashion, beauty, health, food, interiors, homes and the social life of Carlisle. The magazine has its own annual awards, was relaunched with a new design as part of a group-wide refresh of its publisher's Life titles, and was shortlisted for Magazine of the Year at the Regional Press Awards in 2020 — recognition that marks it out among British city magazines.
Launch and founding brief
Trade coverage at launch described Carlisle Living as a new monthly magazine from CN Group Magazines, launched on 25 October and edited by Richard Eccles, who was simultaneously editor of the sister title Cumbria Life. Eccles was joined on the new title by Mary Ingham as commissioning editor and Jane Loughran as features writer — a small founding team drawn from the group's existing magazine operation. The brief was precise: the magazine was aimed at 25- to 45-year-old urban, aspirational individuals, and would cover fashion, beauty, health, food, interiors and gadgets. The distinction from its sister title was geographic as much as demographic. Cumbria Life covered Cumbria as a whole; Carlisle Living was aimed at the northern part of the county only — the city of Carlisle and its surrounding area — giving the group a city product to set alongside its county flagship and a title that Carlisle advertisers and readers could regard as their own.
Carlisle: the city it serves
Carlisle is Cumbria's only city, its county town in all but modern administrative name, and the major population centre of the north of the county, close to the Scottish border. It is a place with a pronounced identity of its own — a castle city on the River Eden, a railway junction of national importance, and a retail and services hub for a wide rural hinterland stretching to the Solway Plain, the north Pennines and across the border into Dumfriesshire. A lifestyle magazine for such a city writes for readers whose lives combine urban working weeks with a countryside hinterland immediately at hand, and that duality shapes Carlisle Living's mix: city fashion, food and interiors alongside the people, weddings, businesses and social occasions of northern Cumbria. The magazine's self-description in recent years — Carlisle Living is a vibrant lifestyle magazine for those who love city life, in the words of its social media profile — keeps the emphasis firmly on the city rather than the county at large.
Contents and regular coverage
The founding coverage areas — fashion, beauty, health, food and interiors — remain the recognisable spine of a city lifestyle title, and the magazine's published output over the years adds the features typical of the genre at its most local: profiles of Cumbrian businesses and producers, society and social-event coverage, weddings, property and homes, and first-person columns from writers across the group's titles. A Cumberland flower farm's account of appearing in both Cumbria Life and Carlisle Living in 2021, for example, describes a five-page feature with photography and writing celebrating a seasonal, sustainable west Cumbrian business, read alongside pieces on Kendal food producers and Lake District venues in the same issue group. The magazine's website invites readers to tell its editorial team about social events, listing a dedicated editorial email address — a small detail that reveals a continuing society-page function, in which readers' own occasions form part of the record the magazine keeps of the city's life.
Publisher: from CN Group to Newsquest
Carlisle Living was created by CN Group Magazines, the magazine arm of the Carlisle-based CN Group, publisher of the city's News and Star and Cumberland News. The CN magazine portfolio of the period included Cumbria Life and Dumfries and Galloway Life alongside Carlisle Living. CN Group's media business was subsequently acquired by Newsquest, and the magazine is now published by Newsquest Cumbria Magazines from Newspaper House, Dalston Road, Carlisle — the address given on the magazine's own contact page, with office hours of Monday to Friday, 9am to 5.30pm, and editorial, commercial and subscriptions contacts listed separately, the editorial inbox for the magazine being at Newsquest. The continuity is significant: through a change of ownership, the title has remained a Carlisle-produced magazine made in the same newspaper building as the city's daily press, rather than being absorbed into a remote lifestyle hub.
The relaunch and design refresh
In a group-wide programme reported by Prolific North, CN Group redesigned its Life titles in sequence: Cumbria Life relaunched from its June issue, Dumfries and Galloway Life followed in July, and Carlisle Living received its new design from the Sept/Oct issue. The new looks, with new content and columnists, were created by Matthew Ball Editorial Design, an Edinburgh-based studio whose other publishing design work had included The Scotsman and Which? magazine. Cumbria Life's relaunch was described by its editor, Richard Eccles — the founding editor of Carlisle Living — as an attempt to refresh perceptions of what a county life magazine is, making the title an essential guide to getting the most out of the county. Carlisle Living's inclusion in the same programme shows the city title being invested in as part of the group's flagship magazine family, with its design aligned to the refreshed county and regional titles.
Carlisle Living Awards
The magazine lends its name to the Carlisle Living Awards, an annual celebration of the city and its businesses promoted through the magazine's own site, where the awards sit alongside subscription offers and photo sales as part of the title's public presence. City magazine awards of this kind — also a feature of the Cumbria Life family, whose food and drink awards are long established in the county — function as both editorial franchise and civic ritual: they give local businesses a recognised accolade, give the magazine a flagship event, and give readers a curated account of the best of their own city. For Carlisle Living, the awards reinforce the Celebrating our city positioning, extending the magazine's role from chronicler of Carlisle life to one of its arbiters — judging, shortlisting and applauding the restaurants, retailers and services its pages cover the rest of the year.
Recognition: Magazine of the Year shortlist
In 2020, Carlisle Living was shortlisted for Magazine of the Year at the Regional Press Awards, the principal awards for Britain's regional press, where it appeared as a Newsquest Cumbria entry alongside its own stablemates Cumbria Life and Dumfries and Galloway Life, and against the Courier Weekend Magazine, Herefordshire Living, The Herald Magazine and Ulster Business. For a city title from one of England's smaller cities to be listed in national company of that kind is a notable marker of standing, and the presence of all three of the Carlisle-based magazines on the same shortlist says something about the strength of the magazine operation the city sustained. The shortlisting came in the awards round covering the pandemic year, a period when local magazines' role in holding communities together — and recording how they lived through an extraordinary period — carried particular weight with judges and readers alike.
Subscriptions and readership
Carlisle Living has been sold by subscription as well as through local retail, with the magazine's own site promoting subscription offers — in 2020, for example, twelve months at £19.99, presented as a saving of just over half on the cover-price cost, with a six-month option also offered — and maintaining a subscriptions team contact for changes and queries. Its social media following gives a further sense of scale: the magazine's Facebook page has attracted more than six thousand likes, a substantial community for a city of Carlisle's size, and one the magazine addresses as readers who love the place they live. Photographers' work for the title surfaces regularly in the wider record, from cover photographs credited in their portfolios to features syndicated across the group, indicating a magazine with a genuine visual life in the city — covers shot locally, events photographed, businesses pictured — rather than a product assembled from agency material.
People and columns
The magazine's founding personnel connect it to the wider Carlisle press. Richard Eccles, its launch editor, had been deputy editor of The Cumberland News and spent almost twenty-five years with the CN Group, editing Cumbria Life from its move to monthly publication in 2008. Among the writers associated with the magazine, the News and Star columnist Roger Lytollis wrote for Carlisle Living as a sister title to his newspapers — his light-hearted 2016 lament about a record-breaking run of journalism award nominations without a win appeared as a column in the magazine, an example of the easy traffic of writers and material between the group's newspapers and magazines. Commissioning editor Mary Ingham and features writer Jane Loughran, named at launch, represent the other half of the operation: the planned features, seasonal issues and special coverage that distinguish a monthly magazine from a newspaper's daily rhythm.
Place among Cumbrian titles
Carlisle Living's position is best understood within its family. Cumbria Life, launched as a quarterly in the 1980s, then bimonthly, then monthly in 2008, is the county flagship, retailing — at the time of its relaunch — at £3.80 with around five thousand subscribers and a claimed readership of around sixty thousand a month. Dumfries and Galloway Life serves the neighbouring Scottish region. Carlisle Living completes the set with the urban north: younger in target age, narrower in geography, more concerned with fashion, gadgets and city social life. The three titles together gave their publisher coverage of the whole border region at three scales — region, county and city. That the city layer survived ownership change, redesign and industry contraction, and reached national award shortlists, suggests it filled its niche as intended: a magazine in which England's border city could see its own life — its shops, tables, homes and celebrations — treated as worthy of the glossy treatment usually reserved for larger places.
