How Britain fell for Wetherspoon’s

Honestly, this is nicer than the X,” says my girlfriend, referencing an international luxury hotel brand whose name you would know but whose favour, as a travel writer, she is keen not to lose.

The problem is that we are not staying with a rival luxury hotel chain. We’re in a Spoons. More specifically, we are in the Greenwood in Sudbury Hill, west London, sampling one of the 40 hotels JD Wetherspoon now operates around the country. Our entire stay, including room, dinner, drinks and breakfast for two, will come to less than a single round of drinks I bought in a bar in Soho the previous week. But, as I look up at the ceiling, my belly full of steak and beer, lying in the comfortable bed, clean from the hot shower, I think: maybe she has a point. Then I begin to question some of my other consumer choices.

Who doesn’t like Wetherspoon’s? Watching my local, the Coronet on Holloway Road, over the course of a week, it’s hard to know. Certainly not the students, who pile in to get leathered on the cheap. Nor the Arsenal fans, for whom pre- and post-game pints are as ritual as their club’s underperformance. Not the families with young children, taking advantage of the pub’s child-friendly early evenings. Not the early-afternoon men who nurse silent pints alone at high tables. Not the two women in their 20s, waiting for their friend to pop to the loo before they start snogging in front of a jug of orange cocktail. Not Margaret Veal, in her 70s, originally from Ireland, who comes every week with her partner after dancing.

“It’s the only place that’s like pubs used to be,” she tells me.

No, as far as I can see, the only people who don’t love Wetherspoon’s are people like me. Review-reading, Michelin-munching, craft-beer seeking, Instagram-denying, middle-class bores. The ones who are as anxious about what their meal says about them as how it tastes and how much it costs. Who went to Byron burger before it sold out, who will queue for pasta but would never order a platter of something. Who no longer have any idea how ironic their love of Nando’s is. People who hold dinner parties. The dinner party, Wetherspoon’s 62-year-old founder and chairman Tim Martin tells me later with a horrified expression, is the exact opposite of the business ethos.

But we are in a minority. Wetherspoon’s is winning. As if we need more evidence, at the end of this month it is opening its largest pub yet: the Royal Victoria Pavilion, an almost 11,000 square foot “Super ’Spoon” on the seafront in now gentrified Ramsgate with terraces overlooking the seafront. The building, a former casino built in 1903, is grade-II listed and its original features have been lovingly restored; mint walls with chessboard tiles and parquet floors, wood panelling and a grand staircase.

As it nears its 40th birthday, the chain has nearly 1,000 branches, at a time when pubs around the country are closing at a rate of 30 per week – the same time it takes Wetherspoon to sell three million pints. In a week it will also serve more than half a million breakfasts, and a million cups of coffee. Its cult appeal is growing. There is a Tumblr account dedicated to its carpets (each pub has a unique design) and a book, too, by author Kit Caless. He visited more than 100 pubs in a year, describing the Samuel Peto in Folkestone, with its painted ceiling, as “the Sistine Chapel of Wetherspoon’s”.

Wetherspoon pubs occupy some of the country’s grandest old spaces, from music halls to cinemas, and routinely win design awards. Each one references the building and the town, such as the Britannia in Plymouth, designed to resemble a cruise ship. This attention to detail inspires surprising levels of devotion, as shown by the number of people who’ve made it a goal to visit every single branch. Or the case of Jacqui Holdsworth, who grabbed headlines earlier this year after locking herself in the loo of a branch in Thornton Heath, south London, in order to steal beer and sandwiches.

To its detractors, Wetherspoon’s epitomises the lowest common denominator, slowly but surely constricting British high streets. Cheap food slung out in vast quantities, washed down with cut-price drinks. Yet to its millions of fans, it represents unpretentious good value: a business built around the customer, who can eat, drink and be merry for a fraction of the price elsewhere. And it really is a fraction of the price. In Nottingham, for example, a pint of Carlsberg is £2.59, a filter coffee is £1.10 and an 8oz rump steak with chips and a free drink is £10.90.

As I learn at the Greenwood, it is also becoming somewhere you can lay your head for the night. Unsurprisingly, every possible expense has been spared. Rather than a reception, there is simply a wardrobe with a bell on it down a corridor to the side of the pub. We push the buzzer and wait. A short time later the manager appears and unlocks the wardrobe, in which the hotel’s check-in desk is located. I explain our mission to him, and he suddenly looks at me in horror.

“Wait, Tim’s not coming is he?” he asks. No, I reply. “Phew,” he says, as the colour returns to his face.

A visit from Tim Martin is something almost all Wetherspoon’s staff have learned to be wary of. Since he founded the firm he has made a point of visiting as many branches he can, as often as he can. He claims to know more than 1,000 staff by name, and prides himself on taking ideas from all levels of the business.

We meet in the Shakespeare’s Head, at Holborn. It’s a long, low-ceilinged room, like the deck of an especially boozy ferry, with signs on every table urging customers to guard their valuables from the thieves known to operate in the area. Unlike many Wetherspoons, it is not a lovely building.

As is his custom he arrives on foot, wearing shorts and a polo shirt, grey hair swept back on top of his head. He has described himself as “anti-fashion”, and there is nothing about his outfit to suggest he has changed his view. He is six foot six, and the staff recognise him at once, a little nervously. The first pub he took over was Marley’s, a converted bookies in Muswell Hill, north London. The name from the business came from JD, a character in the Dukes of Hazzard, and Wetherspoon, a teacher who never thought Martin would amount to much.

He still runs the empire as he did when he founded it in 1979, with meticulous attention to detail, or “monomania”, as he describes it with a chuckle. “I try to go to at least 10 a week,” he says. Over the Easter weekend, notionally on holiday in Cornwall with his wife, he managed 15. “I don’t have a pint in all of them,” he adds quickly.

Martin’s appearance, longevity and happiness to muck in with the public have made him a celebrity among some of his customers. “I thought it was you,” beams a mildly star-struck woman across the table, soon after we sit down. Later, a middle-aged man strides over and introduces himself as a “fellow Francophile, fellow hard Brexiteer”.

Ah yes, Brexit. More than any British company except perhaps Virgin, Wetherspoon’s is a company in the image of its founder: no-nonsense, unfussy, democratic. Martin’s passion for pubs is matched by his loathing for the European Union.

He gave £200,000 to Vote Leave, and was one of the most prominent voices backing Brexit. Unlike many Leavers, he is not low-tax, and takes great pride in the fact that Wetherspoon’s pays 0.1%, or 1/1,000th, of the UK’s total tax revenue. He is in favour of maintaining relatively high immigration rates, and protecting the rights of EU workers – understandable given how many of them he employs.

Yet if you had to design a business that was vulnerable to Brexit, it might be Wetherspoon, with its paper-thin margins and high numbers of foreign-born staff. He concedes that the fall in the pound has squeezed his margins, but says the effect is diminishing by the day.

As a self-made tycoon who estimates his own wealth at around £350m, Martin has appealingly cheap tastes, his most glamorous purchase being the family Volvo. It’s hard not to see Wetherspoon’s as an expression of Martin’s views, and of the populist approach he advocates.

Not all criticism of Wetherspoon is middle-class snobbery. Although cheap, the steak I eat in Northolt is not the tastiest I’ve had. The meat is watery, the mushroom flavourless. And for £3.55 for a full English at the Greenwood – in Holborn it is £4.95, reflecting the greater rents – you cannot expect organic, lovingly reared meat. One former employee says that the best things to order are the chicken tikka masala or the fish and chips, which is fried on site. She adds that the kitchens, in keeping with the pubs in general, are spotless. Cleanliness was one of Martin’s original bugbears, along with music.

Yet there has been a clear effort to make things healthier, too. Every single item has a calorie rating next to it. There are healthy options, including a quinoa salad. Noticing the trend for more unusual ales, Wetherspoon now offers a huge range, and boasts that it is the biggest investor in craft beer in the country.

Martin once thought Britain could sustain 1,500 Wetherspoons, now he thinks the figure is more likely 1,000-1,200. Whatever Brexit brings, he’ll try to get there, by continuing to sell customers what they want, as cheaply as possible.

It’s too easy to write Wetherspoon’s off as populist. Plenty of the chain’s fans are steadfastly middle-class, chomping down salads and sipping diet colas. Like everyone else, they appreciate value for money.

Martin admits he is motivated by the same feeling that “led the Egyptians to make the pyramids. There’s ego involved in everything, but you have to know what you don’t know.”

With that he heads off, notebook in hand, to visit some more pubs. If it’s not broken, why fix it? For the time being, at least, we are living in a Wetherspoon’s world. Its population is comfortable, drunk and full, and becoming a member doesn’t mean breaking the bank. Although it might involve a trip to Sudbury Hill.