Booze, Brexit and bad hair: how Wetherspoons became the most divisive establishment in Britain

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If you’re British and of legal drinking age, the chances are that you have strong feelings, one way or another, about Wetherspoons. Walk down practically any UK high street and you’ll see the name: it might be shouting in block capitals from the roof of a city centre pub, it might be written more discreetly by the entrance of a venue resembling something of a ye olde boozer style, or even outside a converted bank, opera house or swimming pool.

It’s the gateway to a world of migraine-inducing carpets, strangely ornate toilets and aggressively cheap pints. Inside a Spoons, you’re as likely to come across OAPs eating a curry or besuited business types having a speedy meeting as you are to bump into a hen do or encounter a group of teens drinking fluorescent cocktails by the fishbowl, clutching their newly minted IDs.

Last year, the company announced that it had returned to profit for the first time since the pandemic, its low prices drawing in customers against the backdrop of the cost of living crisis. In unrelated news, John Travolta also made headlines when he was spotted at a branch in Norfolk. It’s weirdly beloved by millennials, too, many of whom will have come of age sipping on the aforementioned fishbowls in the binge drinking heyday of the Noughties; on social media, strangers play the Wetherspoons game, buying food and drinks for people they’ve never met using the brand’s app (once you have the table number and the venue, anyone can chip in from afar).

There are currently more than 800 branches of this deeply generic but weirdly idiosyncratic chain across the UK and Ireland, and each one is nominally different: every carpet nods to the local area or the venue’s past life (in 2016, writer Kit Caless published Spoon’s Carpets: An Appreciation, after trekking around the country to document the different patterns). But the atmosphere is almost always the same, whether you’re drinking at the “Super-Spoons” in Ramsgate, the chain’s biggest venue with a 1,400 capacity, or a converted church. Straightforward, fuss-free, maybe a bit bland: a bit like frequenting an airport bar, but in your hometown. What could be controversial about that?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Unlike most run-of-the-mill high street fixtures – your Nandos, your Greggs or your Pizza Expresses – Wetherspoons provokes extremes of emotion among the British public, often (but not always) drawn along culture war lines. And that’s in no small part thanks to its controversial founder, Tim Martin, who was granted a knighthood in the 2023 New Year’s Honours List last month. The 68-year-old Martin, who’s often pictured dressed like a dad in holiday mode, wearing polo shirts and a pair of sunglasses perched on top of his shock of white hair, has become a seriously divisive figure in our national consciousness over the past near-decade: a result of his prolonged and unabashed backing of Brexit during the 2016 referendum and beyond. His shiny new knighthood has served as a lightning rod for the great Spoons debate: is it a haven of affordable, straightforward food and drink, one that’s practically a national institution? Or a soulless, cynical enterprise lining the pockets of one of Vote Leave’s most high-profile supporters? Is his title an example of cronyism in action, or recognition of a genuine contribution to British life?

You can trace the cult of Wetherspoons back to 1979, when Martin, then a barrister studying for his final exams, became a regular at Marler’s, a pub in Muswell Hill; it was one of the only spots in north London that sold the real ale he enjoyed drinking. A few months later, he learned that the landlord was selling up, and made a successful offer (according to Esquire, that offer was a pretty eclectic one, consisting of “£40,000 in cash, a house in Putney and a two-week holiday at [Martin’s] dad’s place in Jamaica”). He re-opened the venue as Martin’s Free House, but that incarnation didn’t last long: the following year, the pub was relaunched as J D Wetherspoon. The name was a strange amalgam: the “J D” is a reference to a character from the Eighties TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, while “Wetherspoon” was the surname of a teacher from Martin’s school days in New Zealand, who had struggled to keep his unruly pupils in line. “I thought: I can’t control the pub [and] he couldn’t control the class,” he has previously said, “so I’ll name it after him.”

An unexpected influence on Martin was George Orwell. In his 1946 essay “The Moon Under Water”, published in the Evening Standard, the writer of 1984 and Animal Farm set out the characteristics of his ideal pub. This dream establishment, he wrote, would sell a “solid lunch” at a reasonable price; there would be no piano playing and no radio buzzing, so that it would “always [be] quiet enough to talk”. Orwell had plenty of other stipulations (Victorian-style decor, pints served in pink china mugs and the ability to sell stamps, cigarettes and aspirin, to name a few), but it’s those two that Martin used as the tenets for his empire – he was so taken with the writer’s pub philosophy that 13 of his venues are still named after “The Moon…”. You don’t have to strain to be heard over music in a Wetherspoons (although the chain did partially relent and install TVs in its premises in 2006, to coincide with the World Cup). And you can always buy a cheap lunch: the classic Spoons stereotype is of all-day fry-ups, but these days you’ll find veggie, vegan and gluten-free options on the menu as well.

Martin didn’t wait long to start buying up new venues: rather than taking over existing pubs, he would scout out unusual sites – be they old post offices, motorbike showrooms or cinemas. They weren’t already tied into contracts with breweries, so he was free to look around for the best booze deals possible, and therefore charge customers less. It’s a tactic that has stayed true for 40 years and has kept their prices low (there’s an urban myth that suggests that Spoons buys beer close to its sell-by date to cut costs, but the company has described this as a “ludicrous fairytale”).

Office for National Statistics figures released last summer showed that the average pint of lager in a pub now costs £4.56; Spoons prices tend to vary depending on which branch you’re drinking in, but according to data gathered by food website Pantry and Larder in October 2023, a pint of Carling costs £3.35 on average. For Spoons devotees and defenders, this affordability isn’t just the key to a cheap night out, it also makes these venues into a form of social hub, where customers can still enjoy a low-priced meal and a chat, at a time when many are struggling with the cost of living. The flipside to this, of course, is that rates like these are hard to compete with, especially if you’re an independent publican still grappling with the fallout from Covid, labour shortages, soaring fuel prices and supply chain issues. Is Spoons one of the last remaining high street “hubs” because it’s undercutting the traditional pubs that locals used to flock to?

And for some, cheap prices can’t mitigate the sour taste left by Martin’s forays into political discourse. The Spoons dichotomy goes something like this: it’s often held up as a sort of egalitarian space, but it is also arguably a vehicle for right-wing populism. In 2016, Martin donated £200,000 to the Vote Leave campaign, and eventually described the result of the Brexit referendum as a “new Magna Carta”. Hundreds of thousands of pro-Brexit beer mats have been launched throughout Martin’s pubs, detailing potential benefits of leaving the EU and, later, urging politicians to hurry along with a deal; a few years after the vote, he banned European beers and sacked off champagne and prosecco in favour of English sparkling wines. He’s also a regular in photocalls with the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg; in 2020, the smiling face of Rishi Sunak cropped up on some Spoons posters, which also used that incredibly cringe pandemic-era nickname for the then Chancellor, “Dishy Rishi” (Sunak didn’t have any involvement with the campaign).

Everyone, of course, is entitled to their own political views: it’s the fact that Martin seems so keen to spread them to his customers that tends to rile Spoons naysayers (who, in turn, tend to get painted as hand-wringing and humourless “Remoaners” by Brexit fans). And it feels slightly delusional to view these pubs in isolation as an unambiguous community good, with Martin as a kind of inadvertent philanthropist, when he has buddied up with political figures who have presided over austerity measures and cuts to public services. If Spoons has become a de facto social hub, you could say that’s an indictment of the dire state of our society, rather than a glowing advert for the company itself.

The controversy, though, has hardly harmed Spoons’ position as the most ubiquitous pub chain in Britain. Martin’s status as a one-man soundbite generator has only fuelled his public profile, and as the nation’s finances are being squeezed and squeezed some more, his brand’s low prices are only going to become more alluring to many. Love Spoons or loathe them, you certainly can’t escape them.