Post by tory on Jan 3, 2024 16:15:37 GMT
Arise Sir Tim Martin, who called his pub chain Wetherspoons after a teacher who said he'd never amount to anything.
This is my local in Tunbridge Wells - the old Opera House. I went in there over Christmas and was able to have a pint of beer for precisely £2.10.
Why is it, however, that this man causes just so much opprobrium? He has probably done more than anyone else in this country to keep the tradition of British pub culture alive. It's good old-fashioned middle-class snobbery.
This is my local in Tunbridge Wells - the old Opera House. I went in there over Christmas and was able to have a pint of beer for precisely £2.10.
Why is it, however, that this man causes just so much opprobrium? He has probably done more than anyone else in this country to keep the tradition of British pub culture alive. It's good old-fashioned middle-class snobbery.
The local MP was angry. Harried police inspectors promised to investigate. Residents were, in their own words, “gobsmacked”, even “devastated”. Protests and vigils were held. Moving, affectionate farewells were written in condolence cards. Pyramids of plastic-wrapped flowers piled up on the site. The area looked like a murder scene. Was somebody killed in South Staffordshire last August? No: not somebody, but something was gone.
To understand the agonies of the British pub, as businesses, social hubs and cultural touchstones, consider the case of the Crooked House in Himley. Last summer it burnt down in a mysterious fire. It was illegally demolished a few days later.
The Crooked House was more than a quarter-millennium old and strangely lopsided. A veering brick building that appeared to be leaning over for a gossip. Its destruction and the “global outcry” that followed led to six arrests, calls for new laws to protect heritage pubs and an investigation into planning regulations. The Crooked House fire has all the glamour of an unusual case. In reality its demise fits into a wider pattern. According to the Campaign for Real Ale, 96 pubs were converted or demolished across the UK in the first half of 2023; 31 of them lacked planning permission. Protecting historic pubs ought to be an easy win for a Conservative government but there was nothing in the King’s Speech about preserving pubs and preventing another Crooked House.
Widen the view and the picture becomes bleaker still. More than two pubs a day closed in the first six months of 2023. Since 2000 a quarter of pubs have closed in Britain. The average price of a pint has almost doubled in 15 years. An entire trade looks as if it is slowly gurgling into a whirlpool.
Sailing happily away from this mess is Sir Tim Martin, the newly knighted founder and chairman of Wetherspoons. To say that Martin’s knighthood for services to hospitality and culture was unwelcome in some quarters would be an understatement. Sarah Woolley, the general secretary of the bakers’ union, called the award corrupt. To Rebecca Long-Bailey, the former shadow business secretary, it was despicable. So incensed was the screenwriter Sarah Phelps that she decided to condemn Britain as a “dank, rancid perineum”. Martin and Wetherspoons regularly activate this ferocity. “His pubs,” wrote Will Self a few years ago, “are shit-brown dollops of establishments smeared incontinently across our cities.”
What could it be about the Brexit-backing Tory donor Martin that generates such florid hatreds? Well, if you were going to grow a British populist in a laboratory, the final product would have Martin-like dimensions. Looming at 6ft 6in, a triple-chinned face with booze-red John Bull cheeks, a scalped lion’s ash-white mane crowning his head like a mad hat. In the 2010s, for about half the country this is what a monster looked like: a pub landlord with Eurosceptic opinions so pungent you could smell them from the street outside. For years Martin staked out his pro-Brexit positions, condemned the EU’s democratic deficit and pulled pints with Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. In his pubs, hectoring bar mats made the case for No Deal. Here was a man who cheerfully answered “my wife” when asked what his most extravagant possession was. His detractors complained about Martin in the same way people complained about his pubs: both were tacky, low-rent, unsophisticated and rough.
There were always too many warts on these portraits. For one thing, Martin’s version of Brexit, which was pro-migration, never had the sharp edges of some of the project’s harder backers. While other Brexiteer entrepreneurs moved their tax domiciles from Hampshire to Monaco (Sir Jim Ratcliffe) or shifted their businesses headquarters from the UK to Singapore (Sir James Dyson), Martin stayed rooted in place. In 2019 Wetherspoons paid tax of £764 million, or one pound in every thousand of UK government revenue. There was always something vomit-making about Jacob Rees-Mogg (nanny; Eton; Trinity College, Oxford; Somerset Capital Management) presenting himself as a man of the people. With Martin — dressed in his threadbare polo shirts, driving his beaten-up Volvo, wearing a cheap watch — what you saw really was what you got.
The same goes for ’Spoons. Nobody could ever accuse these pubs of being perfect but no matter where you are in Britain, how wealthy you are or how old you are, Wetherspoons offers the same basic pub pleasures fast disappearing from village, town and city. No fuss, no nonsense, just good, affordable beers, decent enough food that tastes better when you are drunk and something close to warmth and safety.
In a country that supposedly admires and protects its heritage while letting joints like the Crooked House burn to the ground, Martin and Wetherspoons preserve historic buildings. These pubs occupy old ballrooms and banks, post offices and cinemas. They regularly win design awards; after condemning Martin’s politics, The Architectural Review was forced to admit in 2016: “The patron has done a great service in converting an enormous range of historic buildings into pubs.” Without Martin they would be derelict.
Few knighthoods are as well deserved as this one. “Hospitality” is one thing but “culture” is much more intangible. Still, you can find British culture from 8am, when these pubs open for breakfast, to past midnight when the drunks are rolled out into the street, every day in a Wetherspoons. These are scenes that Chaucer and Hogarth and Dickens might have recognised. At a time when pub culture faces extinction, Martin has protected and expanded it. That is much more important than politics.
Will Lloyd is a commissioning editor and writer at The New Statesman
To understand the agonies of the British pub, as businesses, social hubs and cultural touchstones, consider the case of the Crooked House in Himley. Last summer it burnt down in a mysterious fire. It was illegally demolished a few days later.
The Crooked House was more than a quarter-millennium old and strangely lopsided. A veering brick building that appeared to be leaning over for a gossip. Its destruction and the “global outcry” that followed led to six arrests, calls for new laws to protect heritage pubs and an investigation into planning regulations. The Crooked House fire has all the glamour of an unusual case. In reality its demise fits into a wider pattern. According to the Campaign for Real Ale, 96 pubs were converted or demolished across the UK in the first half of 2023; 31 of them lacked planning permission. Protecting historic pubs ought to be an easy win for a Conservative government but there was nothing in the King’s Speech about preserving pubs and preventing another Crooked House.
Widen the view and the picture becomes bleaker still. More than two pubs a day closed in the first six months of 2023. Since 2000 a quarter of pubs have closed in Britain. The average price of a pint has almost doubled in 15 years. An entire trade looks as if it is slowly gurgling into a whirlpool.
Sailing happily away from this mess is Sir Tim Martin, the newly knighted founder and chairman of Wetherspoons. To say that Martin’s knighthood for services to hospitality and culture was unwelcome in some quarters would be an understatement. Sarah Woolley, the general secretary of the bakers’ union, called the award corrupt. To Rebecca Long-Bailey, the former shadow business secretary, it was despicable. So incensed was the screenwriter Sarah Phelps that she decided to condemn Britain as a “dank, rancid perineum”. Martin and Wetherspoons regularly activate this ferocity. “His pubs,” wrote Will Self a few years ago, “are shit-brown dollops of establishments smeared incontinently across our cities.”
What could it be about the Brexit-backing Tory donor Martin that generates such florid hatreds? Well, if you were going to grow a British populist in a laboratory, the final product would have Martin-like dimensions. Looming at 6ft 6in, a triple-chinned face with booze-red John Bull cheeks, a scalped lion’s ash-white mane crowning his head like a mad hat. In the 2010s, for about half the country this is what a monster looked like: a pub landlord with Eurosceptic opinions so pungent you could smell them from the street outside. For years Martin staked out his pro-Brexit positions, condemned the EU’s democratic deficit and pulled pints with Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. In his pubs, hectoring bar mats made the case for No Deal. Here was a man who cheerfully answered “my wife” when asked what his most extravagant possession was. His detractors complained about Martin in the same way people complained about his pubs: both were tacky, low-rent, unsophisticated and rough.
There were always too many warts on these portraits. For one thing, Martin’s version of Brexit, which was pro-migration, never had the sharp edges of some of the project’s harder backers. While other Brexiteer entrepreneurs moved their tax domiciles from Hampshire to Monaco (Sir Jim Ratcliffe) or shifted their businesses headquarters from the UK to Singapore (Sir James Dyson), Martin stayed rooted in place. In 2019 Wetherspoons paid tax of £764 million, or one pound in every thousand of UK government revenue. There was always something vomit-making about Jacob Rees-Mogg (nanny; Eton; Trinity College, Oxford; Somerset Capital Management) presenting himself as a man of the people. With Martin — dressed in his threadbare polo shirts, driving his beaten-up Volvo, wearing a cheap watch — what you saw really was what you got.
The same goes for ’Spoons. Nobody could ever accuse these pubs of being perfect but no matter where you are in Britain, how wealthy you are or how old you are, Wetherspoons offers the same basic pub pleasures fast disappearing from village, town and city. No fuss, no nonsense, just good, affordable beers, decent enough food that tastes better when you are drunk and something close to warmth and safety.
In a country that supposedly admires and protects its heritage while letting joints like the Crooked House burn to the ground, Martin and Wetherspoons preserve historic buildings. These pubs occupy old ballrooms and banks, post offices and cinemas. They regularly win design awards; after condemning Martin’s politics, The Architectural Review was forced to admit in 2016: “The patron has done a great service in converting an enormous range of historic buildings into pubs.” Without Martin they would be derelict.
Few knighthoods are as well deserved as this one. “Hospitality” is one thing but “culture” is much more intangible. Still, you can find British culture from 8am, when these pubs open for breakfast, to past midnight when the drunks are rolled out into the street, every day in a Wetherspoons. These are scenes that Chaucer and Hogarth and Dickens might have recognised. At a time when pub culture faces extinction, Martin has protected and expanded it. That is much more important than politics.
Will Lloyd is a commissioning editor and writer at The New Statesman