For well-heeled travelers of earlier times, the hotel was often the destination. Attracted by the five-star allure of luxury, people took trips to the Hotel d’Angleterre, not necessarily to Bad Nauheim. I have traveled extensively, staying in over a hundred hotels, motels, hostels, resorts and campgrounds. But only once did I take such a trip. I was not drawn to a storied resort, notable for its cameo appearance in some great early 20th-century novel. No, I was taken by the prospect of staying at a Wetherspoons hotel. This desire carried me to Newport.
The Wetherspoons Hotel
The irregular Victorian hallways creak under every footfall. The screeching grows louder with each step I take toward my dingy room. The 150-year-old Queen’s Hotel howls in agony at my trespass. She wails privately, just as the dead queen did when she lost her Albert. Both have been damned to live on earth, wallowing in limbo long after losing their respective purpose. Unlike her namesake, The Queen’s Hotel of Newport, Wales has been forcibly remarried. The husband, one Mr. J. D. Wetherspoon, has moved in downstairs, expropriating the entrance hall and sitting room to establish his drinking den. Like any proper Victorian couple, husband and wife keep their distance. Each has a separate entrance; you cannot go from hotel to pub without stumbling over a few meters of pavement.
J. D. Wetherspoons PLC, as anyone who has lived in Britain should know, is a public company that operates a chain of pubs in the UK and Ireland. Since the opening of the first Wetherspoons in 1979, the corporation has expanded to almost 900 locations. The chain’s extensive menu features a range of food from British and other generic cuisines, studiously microwaved by pimply teenagers. The food is eminently palatable. More importantly, cheap alcohol attracts a regular stream of thirsty Britons, generating immense wealth for the firm’s owners, namely Tim Martin, Wetherspoons’ charismatic founder and chairman.
Famous for his brash style, professed love of Britain and disdain for Europe, Martin triumphantly led his business out of the EU, cleansing his menus of haughty and overrated nectars like French Champagne and German schnapps after the Brexit vote. He has no desire to expand his empire to Europe, except to the Republic of Ireland, whose membership of the union is apparently negated by its history of British rule.
Parroting the bold and brusque style of its boss, Spoons, as the pubs are popularly known, presents itself as offering a superior pub experience. The brand is founded upon the paradoxical claim of embodying an ethos which is both unique and traditional. Too many British pubs have lost their way in recent decades, Martin might say, and Wetherspoons offers drinkers, diners and communities a chance to go out in a less pretentious way.
Despite existing in hundreds of places at once, Wetherspoons is special; special because it is normal. The atmosphere is comfortably bland, self-consciously positioned as the ideal habitat for the British everyman. Each pub is linked to a prouder past, and to each other through common menus, motifs and policies. Most notably, Wetherspoons pubs abstain from playing music — yet, in a sense, each uses the same playlist, the same repeating symphony of slurps and babble. Each pub adorns itself with indigenous flavour by operating under a unique name drawn from local history. No two Spoons have the same carpet. Each has usurped an impressive historic building, a structure erected in happier times when men were men, London was no mere ‘global city’ but the capital of an empire and every small town had an architectural monument signifying the glory of queen and country. Many are from the 19th century; the rest pretend to be. Wetherspoons visitors are invited to explore these similar differences and study each pub’s individuation. Every rug, every story, every Spoons, is undeniably distinct. Yet each is essentially the same. The company’s aggressive branding has borne fruit: beyond mere financial success, Wetherspoons and the narratives it promulgates have disseminated into the public culture of the UK.
Recently, the firm has ventured into the hotel business. Today there are more than 50 Wetherspoons hotels operating in all corners of the UK. All have full-service pubs attached and most, like the Queen’s, are small Frankenstein affairs, converted from older, prouder independent hotels. I had dreamed of staying at one since I learned of their existence. What could be better than sleeping in a Spoons? I fantasized about drunkenly stumbling up to my room and groggily descending for a full English the next day. I imagined the perfect budget party holiday. A touch of local culture, sustenance and accommodation all in the same building.
Whenever I am in the UK I make a point to spend as much time in as many different Wetherspoons pubs as possible. They entice me because they offer the familiar, streamlined comforts of modern drinking (large variety of drink in modern and traditional styles, decent food, order-by-app, low prices enabled by low wages, etc.) while serving up a slice of the exotic. Though America is full of imitation British taverns, I have yet to see one that could replicate the patrons. Glowing with boozy euphoria and unwarranted self-satisfaction, I bask in the pretence of the pubs’ design and opulent yet provincial architecture. I admire the historical gesturing embodied in each establishments’ black and white photos. I read every placard elucidating the venerable pedigree of every Spoons’ particular subtitular name.
My conservative inclination toward the familiar draws me to Wetherspoons. So does my touristic curiosity. This opposing impulse makes me seek out knowable unknowns and drives me to compare unique carpets. Whether they offer accommodation or not, all Wetherspoons are like hotels: they are endlessly differentiated, yet each incarnation has the same meaning. All chain restaurants utilize this confounding recipe, catering to consumers’ primal bias towards the familiar as well as their desire to experience something special. It is a comforting illusion. Nowhere is it so shamelessly and magnificently sustained as in Spoons.
Most hotel enterprises are predicated on the same formula. They offer the impossible promise of a home away from home, providing a private space with a comfortable bed in an unfamiliar location. These gestures toward sanctuary are of course compromised by the nature of the establishment. How can one sleep soundly where a stranger slept the night before? An alien presence invades the bed, the most intimate, vulnerable space we inhabit. And when we leave, a part of us joins the host of ghosts, violating and haunting those who come next. Yet, by necessity and through the miraculous faculty of cognitive dissonance, we accept these violations and buy into the illusion. Hotels and Wetherspoons pubs can both be read as paradoxical planes, oxymoronic zones which thrive on contradiction.
The Queen’s Hotel is a Wetherspoons. It is also a hotel. The bar and dining area is like any other Spoons. That is to say, it is not exactly like any other Spoons. The third-largest city in Wales, Newport seems a small town to me, dreary, uncouth and British. It has a nice view of the Bristol Channel and little else.
Like the pubs, Wetherspoons hotels make efforts to vaunt their communities to transient guests. Every room is decorated with framed drawings by local children, clipped from the local newspaper. In Newport, the Spoons is a social hotspot. The small city needed a club and Mr. Wetherspoon provided one. On the Friday night in February when I visited, it seemed like half the youth of Newport was there.
Unlike any other Spoons that I have patronized, The Queen’s Hotel does play music. As I settled into my room after a late dinner at the Indian around the corner, the siren song of the weekly DJ set reverberated through the walls, forcibly penetrating into my hotel room above. I descended. The place was packed. 20-year-old women clad only in lipstick and bras stood outside, impervious to the cold. The smoke of their cigarettes drifted inside, perfuming the polo shirts of lonely men with vacant eyes, complementing the odor of the miasma of alcohol and sweat. Booze was everywhere. I couldn’t get any booze. Demand was too high, too much competition. The air was intoxicating enough. The dance floor was as busy as the bar. Blinded by the flickering stage lights and flashbangs of smartphone selfies, I struggled to take everything in. But I could make out the important things.
I saw him, Martin’s everyman. The everywoman too. This was their place, the local place, small and unpretentious. A Wetherspoons and a hotel. A tangle of exquisite conundrums. A marvel to behold.
If post-postmodern deconstructionist academia has taught me anything, it is that every notion and phenomena that I might find substantive or meaningful is actually an illusion manufactured by a society. Noting that society itself, following Margaret Thatcher’s equally bold pronouncement, doesn’t exist either, I conclude that everything is an illusion conjured by a collective fantasy. Thatcher was not disturbed by this state of affairs. Neither is Martin. Analyzing his paradoxical and anachronistic creation, it seems that propagating phantasms doesn’t bother him either. Though the three of us would not see eye-to-eye on politics, I will join their company in this: I too am not bothered by illusions. Perception is paramount. For this reason, I embrace Wetherspoons, pubs and hotels all. Paradoxes can be beautiful.
William Stupp is a writer from Missouri, USA. He is interested in telling stories which use the individual and internal as a catalyst for examining broader phenomena.