Shoppers had to be rescued from lifts as a power cut plunged city centre stores into darkness.

Firefighters were called to two shops in Carlisle as 500 buildings suffered a loss of electricity yesterday.

Crews from the city’s east and west fire stations worked to free people who had become trapped in lifts at Boots, in English Street, and New Look, in the Lanes Shopping Centre, respectively.

Crew manager John Murphy said: “We had two lift rescues at the same time.”

He said it took 15 minutes to release one person from each of the lifts at abut 10am.

“You can override the system and manually wind down lifts then use small tools to open the door to release them,” he added.

Shops were left counting the cost of closure during the first couple of hours of regular trading.

The problems forced stores to close in large parts of the city centre during the first couple of hours of regular trading yesterday.

Bosses say health and safety rules meant they could not keep the doors open during the outage.

Swathes of the city centre, from the railway station area to Scotch Street, were out of action leaving many shoppers and workers to gather in the pedestrianised area.

Ian Proudfoot, site support manager at The Lanes shopping centre, said: “Our car park wasn’t affected because the new side of the shopping centre, where Debenhams is, gets its electricity from the northern side of the city system.

“Unfortunately the other side of the centre was affected in parts.”

Most of those affected were without power for around an hour and 45 minutes.

Electricity North West said they were first alerted to the problems at 9.45am. In total, 506 customers were affected.

Motorists were also affected as some of the city centre’s network of traffic lights were out because of the fault.

The company said the power cut was originally reported by people in the James Street area of the city.

The problems were caused by a high voltage fault which led to crucial equipment being damaged, according to the spokesman.

Engineers were immediately dispatched to the scene in an attempt to restore power quickly.

Power was restored by about 11.30am. Many of the stores had staff place handwritten notes on shop doors informing customers of the problems.

A large queue also formed beside the ATM outside Marks & Spencer, one of the few stores still open. Many others elsewhere were out of action.

Carol Donockley, of Stanwix, Carlisle could not get into Tesco. She said: “I popped into town to pick up some wholemeal flour to make some homemade chocolate digestives from a recipe in a new book I got for Christmas but I’m heading home empty handed.