An American in Wetherspoons

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the pub.

By Josh Kazali

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

In many ways, England is an unlikely candidate for Americans studying abroad in Europe. It doesn’t boast the lively nightlife of Berlin or Barcelona; it lacks the ancient ruins of Athens or Rome; the cuisine certainly doesn’t hold a candle to Parisian croissants or Florentine pastas; and for weather, you’d frankly be better off anywhere else on God’s green earth. But Great Britain still boasts one shining cultural triumph, something wholly unique among its European compatriots: the humble public house. 

If you spend enough time around wayward Britons at Columbia (or, in my case, date one), it’s only a matter of time before they begin to wax poetic about their local pub. Surrounded by classy cocktail joints, seedy dive bars, crowded student spots, and everything in between, it’s difficult to imagine the city lacking a watering hole of any kind. Myself, I was always rather skeptical of the sanctity surrounding the pub. After all, a pint is a pint is a pint—isn’t the pub just another place to get one? Yet, with an affinity for British literature and historic drinking venues, I landed at Heathrow Airport ready to see what all the fuss was about.  

The Campaign for Real Ale (also known as CAMRA, a powerful organization that shows just how seriously the British take their brew) remarks that a pub needs only two things: It must “be open to and welcome the general public” and “allow drinking on the premises.” For a relatively small city, Cambridge has these in spades, places decked in old wood, ripe with the smell of yeast, with names like “the Anchor,” “the Eagle,” “the Pickerel,” and my personal favorite, “the Panton Arms.” 

The Panton Arms exemplifies the pub in all the ways I grew to love, and I immediately gravitated to my local: It’s reliable, a five-minute walk from my shabby room in South Cambridge. It’s cozy, with a warm indoors and a spacious patio (for the few days during the English spring that one wants to enjoy outdoors). It is intimate, and on Thursdays a group of older musicians gathers to play Irish folk music, not performing for us so much as each other and the pints of Guinness they down. There’s a magical atmosphere in great pubs like the Panton that makes you feel deeply comfortable, content to stay sunk in the cushioned couches for as long as you need. If this is what every pub is like, perhaps England has a rightful claim to being Shakespeare’s “other Eden.” 

Americans, I think, enjoy and admire pubs like the Panton Arms on their vacations to the sceptre’d isle. To stop here, however, paints an incomplete portrait of the pub. To see the rest, you’ll want to stay up later—past 11 p.m., when most pubs in England close—and walk up the high street to a place called “the Regal.” The Regal is a pub owned by J D Wetherspoon, a conglomerate colloquially known as “Spoons.” And if the Panton exhibits the pub for what it can aspire to be, Spoons exhibits what the pub is—its truthful and occasionally unflattering reflection.

. . .  

First, there is no J D Wetherspoon. The English company is a series of chain pubs that borrows its name from a character from the ’70s American television series, The Dukes of Hazzard—a bizarreness which befits Spoons. They buy big, strange, unused spaces, like banks, opera houses, or in the case of the Regal, cinemas, and convert them into vast and outlandish pubs. The Regal has two stories and could surely fit over 400 people. On weekend nights before Cambridge students flock to one of the few clubs in town, I suspect it frequently does. It is grand in the same way that a Las Vegas casino is grand, with garish patterned carpet and massive chandeliers, bathing the entire place in a flat, pale glow. It is sticky from pitchers of shockingly colored cocktails, and a little smelly from plates of greasy food. Drinks here are cheap, sometimes as low as £2 at the Regal (pretty good for post–Brexit times), and people imbibe accordingly (in the King’s English, they get properly pissed). It is, in its way, a church—a comparison strengthened by the fact that one Spoons in Scotland is literally a converted chapel.

The Regal is profoundly unkempt, uncouth, and ungraceful, and yet people just go. Students, retirees, in some cases, families. You will go, too. You will drink the neon cocktails (or, in my case, an alarmingly cheap lemony concoction known as “Hooch” that some rowers recommended). You will use the palatial bathroom. And in spite of the splitting headache you will have the next morning, when someone texts you “Spoons?” that night, you will invariably, unflinchingly, happily go again.

It is this loyalty to the pub that most fascinates me. Wetherspoons is owned by Tim Martin, a controversial English businessman with a shock of gray hair (one YouTube commenter notes his passing resemblance to Steve Bannon). Besides owning the popular pub chain, Martin became a public figure for his fierce advocacy for Brexit, donating £200,000 in 2016 to the Vote Leave campaign. His statements have led some to call for boycotts. Yet, because of its essential place in English culture, or if you’re more cynical, because of the merciless undercutting of Wetherspoons pricing, Spoons prevails in its ubiquity. This, too, is what the pub is: a place that you return to time and time again, if not out of desire, out of habit. The deep groove the pub wears into the English psyche is something my American mind strained to grasp, and yet I desperately wanted to understand. I needed an expert.

. . .

Fortunately, in my neck of North London happened to live Jimmy McIntosh, a copywriter who moonlights as a pub aficionado. Under the moniker @londondeadpubs, McIntosh has cataloged and mapped over 4,000 locations throughout London that have been shuttered, closed, or burned down in the city’s centuries-long affair with the pub. His commitment to the project borders on the obsessive: “My girlfriend’s like, ‘You wanna come watch The Wire?’ I’m like, ‘No, I gotta map these pubs.’” More recently, McIntosh has dipped into reviewing pubs around London on his social media accounts, as well as writing for The Fence as the magazine’s “pints correspondent.”  

I met McIntosh at the Coronet, a former Spoons which now is a mostly vacant, still-vast pub on Holloway Road in North Islington. By the time I arrived, he had already downed the better half of a pint of San Miguel. He has a sixth sense for the innate quality of a pub, something that he terms the DPF—the Dead Pub Factor—in his videos. I eagerly asked him how he quantifies this mystical je ne sais quoi, to which he responded frankly: “Do you want to spend a whole afternoon in this place getting slowly pissed with your mates? Yes or no?” 

I could have listened to McIntosh talk about pubs for hours. He told me of his love of tacky ’70s carpeting, admiration for New York’s dive bars, and distaste for Millenial exposed-brick-and-pipe refurbishment. He emphasized the role of the pub as a common ground for English life. “You have your house, you have your office, you need somewhere else to exist,” he told me, describing the pub as a crucial third space. “I got married!—Let’s go to the pub! My dad died—let’s go to the pub,” he said. “It’s the backdrop to which the theaters of our lives play out.”

McIntosh slips into poetry when speaking about pubs with remarkable ease, a flair for the romantic that he extended to our conversation about Wetherspoons. He readily admitted Tim Martin’s flawed persona (“a real cantankerous cunt, looks like a cartoon shotgun has gone off on his face”). But he also argued that in spite of his issues with the massive corporate conglomerate, to condemn the people who depend on Spoons to gather, commune, and interact is to misdirect that frustration. “Ultimately, if you’re bringing people together in this place, it’s their lifeline.” 

In that sense, perhaps Spoons exists as the perfect example of a third space, one that has been entirely redefined by its patrons. “They’re cathedrals of memory,” McIntosh said, gazing wistfully into his pint. “Some of the best nights of my life have been in Wetherspoons pubs—some of the first snogs I’ve ever had, wakes I’ve been to for friends who’ve died have been in Wetherspoons. Everything happens in Wetherspoons, more broadly, pubs in general.” 

. . . 

I think I see where McIntosh is coming from. For him, and many other Brits, the pub is a centrifugal site, a place where the often fraught nature of English identity can find some semblance of equilibrium. For that, it is sacred. As we finished our interview and headed for one more drink at McIntosh’s favorite pub (which I will not disclose out of respect for the relationship between an Englishman and his local), I wondered, not for the first time: Why can’t we have this in New York? Is it our lingering sense of puritanism, or the dry years of Prohibition, or simply an American sense of defiance that precludes pub culture from harboring on our Yankee shores?

The pub expects nothing of you. If you have a couple of pounds to buy a drink, you are a member of a community. As CAMRA says, pubs must first and foremost be “be open to and welcome the general public.” This openness allows English pubs to transcend their definition and blossom into something endlessly unique and significant, from the intimacy of the Panton Arms to the hedonism of Wetherspoons. 

If you have friends who have studied abroad, or have studied abroad yourself, you have no doubt heard the lessons of foreign travel ad nauseam. You have heard, and are already growing tired of, the semesterly Parisians cloying for wine and cigarettes, the Berliners moaning about New York’s techno scene, the Florentines decrying the price of an Aperol spritz in Manhattan. Though the pub may not be as sexy as the clubs of Barcelona, the ruins of Rome, or the canals of Amsterdam, I see why Londoners join their ranks, longing for what they briefly enjoyed in their time away from the Upper West Side. 

The pub is a kind of miraculous togetherness with only a bit of lager to grease the wheels. It is a lesson in camaraderie and commiseration, in claiming space—something which Columbia has in such little quantity—and using it to build memories, start conversations, or just be alone. It’s this philosophy which distinguishes the pub from your everyday American bar, a gospel whose praises I intend to sing throughout Morningside Heights. For now, though, I’ll have to find somewhere else to drown my sorrows.