Wetherspoons is a publicly quoted company and its legal duty is to shareholders. That said without customers there is no profit.
Spoons currently has around 800 pubs and is opening news ones (for example in London at Fulham Broadway and London Bridge). It also continues to close pubs. That latest closure list has around half a dozen pubs including the Baxters Court in Hackney (opened 2003)
Thanks at least in part to the activities of Sir Tim Martin Wetherspoons is something of a marmite pub chain. However its no music, all day food and reasonably priced drinks mean, as the beer writer Pete Brown has pointed out, that many Spoons fulfil function similar to the Working Persons Club.
Hence closures are not popular. Below is a fletter I wrote to CAMRA’s London Drinker magazine in 2003 about the closure of one of the original Haringey Spoons, the Old Suffolk Punch(opened 1983). Its now a betting shop.
Wetherspoons reasons for pub closures tend to be on the opaque side but occasionally community campaigns get the decision reversed (Rochester Castle, Stoke Newington). At one point it was claimed that there were too many Spoons pubs in close proximity to one another in some locations (i.e the Angel and the White Swan at opposite ends of Upper St, Islington). Spoons have also had a programme of buying the freeholds of leaseholds pubs which aside from everything else gives them control of maintenance
Additionally in recent times most closed Spoons do seem to continue as pubs, although not on the Spoons model. That said, and this may seem odd to those who are not fans, the community role many Spoons play is lost with concern when closures occur.
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