15 October 2016

The cult of Wetherspoons: why does the pub chain inspire such devotion?

Despite an estimated four pubs closing every day, Wetherspoons continues to thrive. I spoke to the man who – literally – wrote the book on it to find out why.

By Benjamin Myers

When the 24-year-old Tim Martin opened his first pub in Muswell Hill, London, in 1979, he exercised no imagination and named it Martin’s Free House. That didn’t bode well, but in the first months of the 1980s, he decided to change it to “J D Wetherspoon”, after a teacher from his schooldays in New Zealand whom Martin considered too nice to control a bunch of unruly kids.

“I thought: I can’t control the pub [and] he couldn’t control the class,” Martin said last year, “so I’ll name it after him.”