40 years on: the origins of Wetherspoons. The Song Remains the Same
Wetherspoons is much in the news at the moment, not always for the best reasons. The man still in charge, Tim Martin, has become a pro-Brexit campaigner, and has made pre-Brexit price reductions in his pubs. Meanwhile Wetherspoons workers have been suggesting that it might be an idea if they had decent pay and conditions.
Wetherspoons started out 40 years ago in North London and it all looked a bit different then.
At that point it was a model of progressive thinking in the beer world. No music, no gaming machines, all day food, reasonably priced beer and so on. Customers were attracted who might not otherwise have entered a pub.
The very first (not quite) Wetherspoons was Marlers Bar in Muswell Hill. Andrew Marler is still around and has owned pubs in the St Albans area in recent years. However the pub is associated with Tim Martin who took it over and launched a chain of bars, at first in the North London Borough of Haringey almost exclusively
My memory suggests that Marlers was a joint venture between Andrew Marler and Tim Martin. The officially approved version indicates that Marler was the original owner and then sold to Martin. That did not preclude Martin from having an interest previously of course but it is Marler I remember behind the bar.
What of the beer in Marlers? My memory suggests that it was from regional brewers like Wadworths, Greene King and Ruddles that were then hardly available in London. CAMRA sources from the time concur. I thought I also recalled Sam Smiths but I might well be wrong..
A friend who I drank with in Marlers at the time, Mark Baker, recalls ‘it was quite exotic stuff for that part of the world at that time (i.e. wasn’t Ind Coope or Courage!)’
It was certainly the case that Marlers was a shop conversion (more or less unheard of the time). It appears to have been a bookies. Before that the interweb suggests it was a private drinking club for footballers, One source says Spurs, another Arsenal. We can be sure it was not both but the pub is on the Arsenal side of Haringey so it was quite probably them.
The pub has long since ceased to be a Spoons anyway but the story has a, for some, happy ending.
Wetherspoons have returned to Muswell Hill, up the hill, just at the top of the hill itself. The Mossy Well is rather a handsome pub and were you in the area you could do worse than stop by. Possibly best not to mention the name Marler though.
The problem is that while 40 years on Tim Martin is probably now at least as well-known as a Brexiteer as a pub owner, the successful Wetherspoons model of 1979 remains largely unchanged.
It is popular enough but no longer at the cutting edge of progressive developments in beer and bars as it was then.
Perhaps a new, Brexit free, Tim Martin is required to develop a model for 2019
Tim Martin told Desert Island Discs (3rd December 2017) about the early days of Marlers Bar in Muswell Hill & about the expansion of Wetherspoons in North London:
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