I flew to Wetherspoons Alicante for a pint

The modern Englishman abroad has never been so well catered for

Why do they do it? How do we do it? The time was 3.57am, at Gatwick’s North Terminal. And at the airport Wetherspoons, by almost every elbow, was a pint of alcohol – golden Stellas, copper Leffes, mahogany Strongbow Dark Fruits. En route to the table of some steel-stomached legend, one waitress was carrying a 660ml bottle of Birra Moretti, her tray high above our heads, like an empress on her litter. No one thought there was anything wrong or strange about this, about giving their livers an early-morning soak, grimacing through the early-start nausea. The only drama was a spat between two haggard barmaids (“Erica, that is rich coming from you, just saying”).

But otherwise, duty, routine and even fatalism prevailed. In precisely that mood, I looked down at my own lager. One of the bubbles in its foam cap swelled and burst, winking up at me. I tipped it back, and started to drink. I’m not sure if the beer worked as it should. Certainly, at this early hour, it didn’t make me feel drunk; it made me feel like I was still drunk, still burping up the bubbles from a previous night. Regardless, pleasure had nothing to do with this trip.

This was pure business, a summertime mission to witness the modern Englishman abroad. There was a time when this phrase had something to do with linen suits, BOAC and gin and tonics taken in a Levantine bar. These days it means holidays. And for millions of Brits that means Spain, and it means Costa Blanca, and it means booze. Pub culture and an unembarrassable, headlong approach to nightlife – these are the things that we’re known for around Europe. With limited time, resources and imagination, I booked my tickets. A 24-hour trip to the “Castell de Santa Bàrbara”, which opened in February in Alicante airport, becoming the first Wetherspoons pub outside our little archipelago. A British business success story, a chance to see a nation at leisure, or simply proof of the scale of Iberian tolerance?

There are two types of travellers on early-morning flights. There are those who dress up, and those who dress abysmally down. One group can pass quite glamorously in floaty linens, and another will follow in a genre of clothing somehow more casual than pyjamas – all-body cottons, logoed loungewear, heads hunkered with wraparound travel pillows, like the cones they use to stop dogs chewing their stitches. It’s a disagreement over when the holiday begins – before you get on the plane, or several hours after you arrive at the hotel.

A 5.10am departure, my flight was no different. Between the snoozing baseball caps and snoring hoodies, Lauren’s hen do paraded sharply by, exfoliated and eyelinered, one white T-shirt followed, like a swan by ducklings, by six pink. In the aisle seat, a retired polo shirt bored on about his house on the Costa (“It’s 46 to 48 minutes from the airport, depending on traffic”). He was a Brit abroad. “When I bought it, there was one tap, one toilet and one socket that worked.” Now, after 18 months’ renovations: “Two kitchens, two bathrooms, six bedrooms, 700 metres of AstroTurf…” He was back in Britain only for two weeks to visit his mum, and he hates the UK. “Whatever you earn, they want to tax it. In Spain” – he gestured, chopping a flat hand through the air – “it’s a straight 20 per cent.” The next few days were a doss: “Thursday, golf; Friday, take the car in, golf in the afternoon… The benefits of being retired!” His expatriate life was proof of Wetherspoons’ new market, the rolling economic-cultural transfer between Great Britain and southern Spain.

And why not – if anything it’s England that’s becoming more like Spain. Exiting the aeroplane and being greeted by hot air was no surprise; this summer the Chilterns must be as parched and crumbling as any of the hills round Alicante. I was barred from the Wetherspoons until early evening – you couldn’t access departures until five hours before your flight – and so I took a quick look around the place. It looks like every other Spanish resort town: apartment blocks, the old fortress, the sea dappling weakly under a strobe sun. On the beach, visitors were preparing for a day of over-exposure and over-indulgence. The Gatwick morning scene was already recreating itself. As Evelyn Waugh put it in Labels: A Mediterranean Journal, “Once the Englishman abroad has fully assured himself of the fact that he can buy wine or beer or spirits whenever he wants them, it is usual to see him adopting the routine to which he is accustomed.”

My jaunt ended just as it began. The crowd in the Castell de Santa Bàrbara was large and tired, freckle-faced and sun-sick. But it was clear this was a place of equilibrium, and predictability. Hence the concessions to mainland continuity: the racks of sauces, the trusty Stella draught, the cutlery tucked up in their little napkin duvets. The menu is a shortened version of the English (the Spanish items sold when the Bàrbara first opened appear to have been dropped), and when my burger came it was served on the same shield-like blue plate that I’ve seen many times before.

But Castell de Santa Bàrbara didn’t look like a Wetherspoons, and it didn’t feel like a Wetherspoons. Not here the alcoholic regulars, the lonesome nutcases, the adhesive carpet – you know, the kind that sucks the shoes off your feet. The Bàrbara has a tiled floor (material unknown), and is lit by naked, orb-like bulbs, hanging delicately from lengths of string. It is staffed by efficient Spanish waiters, to whom I gave an awful shock when I explained why I’d travelled here (“¿Giurnalist?”).

In the smoking “terrace” (a caged greenhouse overlooking the airport bus park that should really be used to keep exotic plants), I found Karen and her silent husband, who live in Albatera, a town about 40km south of Alicante, and who are visiting the old country. The pub’s “fine”, she said, chewing a vape. “You can sit out here and have a puff!” But it’s “not like back home. Not like a proper Wetherspoons.” Russ, a Midlander with the largest smart watch I’ve ever seen, was on his way home from Benidorm. He agreed. “It’s a Spanish bar with an English name,” he said. But he said the brand would bring in customers: it “tells you you’re nearly home”.

The Wetherspoons chain is proud of the Castell de Santa Bàrbara. It seems to regard it as the beginnings of an overseas empire. On its website, there’s a map of their establishments in Britain and Ireland, with Spain drawn several inches distant. The rest of Europe is missing, giving the appearance of a speculative colonial chart: blank terra incognita waiting to be explored, and Santa Bàrbara marking its first beachhead, its Virginia. Indeed, that appears to be the case: Josep Tarradellas Barcelona-El Prat Airport is expecting two new Wetherspoons, the first later this year in Terminal 1, the second in Terminal 2 in 2027.

Imagine it: a chain of pubs across Europe, available, like consulates, for any stranded Englishman. At least then you wouldn’t have to seek out an Irish pub when you want to watch the Champions League match on holiday. But perhaps this is the strangest thing about England’s newest colony: there is nothing exclusively English about it. However uniquely dissolute we feel, a craving for hot weather and crude highs is universal to most national cultures. The only distinctive thing about the English abroad might be the lusty extravagance with which they pursue it.

[Further reading: The battle for Mallorca]