Ummmm, generally I suppose we refer to it as ‘that dump’
Seriously, neither. Don’t they all have individual names? The two Wetherspoons pubs here are the Golden Lion and the Cricketers, and are referred to as such.
My most local Spoons is actually a Moon Under Water, so that’s usually just referred to as “meet you in the Moon”. If we’re in Brum, we have to be specific about which Spoons pub we’re going to because there are several - talking amongst my usual drinking crowd, we could refer to it as Spoons because we almost exclusively go to the Briar Rose, but amongst a wider group we’d have to be more specific.
However, why would we bother going to Spoons when we’ve got the delights of The Welly?
Can’t say I’ve heard of either. I live on the south coast, work in London and drink with people from various parts of the country. It’s always Wetherspoons in full. If referring to a particular one then it’s either by name e.g. “We’re going to the Moon” or by location e.g. “the Wetherspoons in Terminal 2”.
I like Wetherspoons, but I guess I’ve not been to a really scuzzy one.
GorillaMan, yours does food - I’m nearly jealous! The bonus of the Welly is that they don’t serve food themselves but will happily provide plates and cutlery etc for any takeaway you choose to order. The local places are used to delivering there!
They decided to call our new one “The Rann Wartha” to try and be local. But no one locally has a clue how to pronounce that, so maybe that’s why we ended up calling it Spoons.
Also it’s the only one in atleast a 10 mile radius so we’ve no need to identify it except by town.
While I tend to refer to individual boozers by their given name (if I can remember it), my mate the execrable Jez always refers to any belonging to that particular chain as a 'Spoons.
We frequent several in central London, but usually the Sir John Oldcastle in Farringdon or the Knights Templar off Chancery Lane.
This is very true, however Spoons does have one small advantage over the other pubs in my town. A friend and I organised a monthly social club night which we decided to have in a pub in town, so we started looking around for suitable venues.
Being real ale drinkers, we immediately the discarded the pubs that sell 46 different types of lager and one bitter (usually John Smith’s or the ubiquitously nasty Banks’s). That left us with a small number of pubs that served a decent range of real ales, were in the city centre and close to bus/rail links as well as parking facilities.
Of those, we discounted the ones that showed sports because we met on Wednesdays and that was a popular night for footie. Then we ignored the ones that were dimly-lit (some of our group are women who arrive on their own and don’t necessarily want to go into a pub where they can’t too easily), and the ones that blared music as if they had aspirations to be nightclubs. It’s a social thing, we want to talk, dammit.
That left us with three pubs. Two of those served food, to satisfy the people from out of town who wanted a meal when they got there. One of those two pubs got refurbished and entered the “dimly-lit wannabe nightclub” group. That left us with the Moon Under Water.
Despite the colourful local clientele, it was at least cheap and cheerful and the beer selection wasn’t bad!
Well I work in one and we all call it 'spoons, even though technically it’s a Lloyd’s (one plays music, the other doesn’t).
Though maybe that’s because there’s only one around here. Back at home I’ll probably say I’m going down the ‘George’ or the ‘Eva Hart’ but only because they were called that before they were spoons.
Definitely called Spoons. No one I know refers to it as The Half Moon (if that’s even the right name). I don’t pretend it’s a great pub, but it’s cheap and spacious and has sofas. I’ll settle for that. I don’t go to pubs enough to be a snob about them, really.
I’ll even admit to eating there occassionally - you do these things when you’re a student.
There isn’t one in Oxford, so I don’t end up referring to it very often - when I have, it’s almost always as ‘Wetherspoons’, though the one near St. Nicholas Market in Bristol gets its given name, ‘The Commercial Rooms’.
Contrary to most of the opinions in this thread, I’m quite a fan of Wetherspoons, mainly because they serve multiple kinds of real cider. This is unremarkable in Bristol, but very nice to find when outside the South West! The food… well, it’s cheap.
The food? Better to become an alcoholic, derive all of your calories from alochol, and develop Wernicke-Korsakoff’s syndrome than eat that crap. My global opinion of the entirety of the British population dropped by 17% upon, “eating,” at a Wetherspoons and realizing that this was actually a marginally popular place to eat in England. One of the most singularly horrible culinary experiences of my entire life. I’ll even place the restaurants that have given me food poisioning above that hellhole because at least they were making an effort to serve real food.
It’s no wonder why you folks lost your empire. Serving food like that tips the scales of tolerability for being a colony.
I sort of boycott The Commercial Rooms, in a childish attempt to get them back for voluntarily banning smoking before the ban. But I went to another one on Saturday which was serving a good pint of Old Rosie cider - a welcome surprise. I just call them ‘Wetherspoons’, as they are too similar to deserve individual names in my mind.
