My favourite Wetherspoon’s, the Pool Under Willows, is only two minutes from a railway station, but it is on a side street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.
Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of regulars who occupy the same tables every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.
If you are asked why you favour Wetherspoon’s, it would seem natural to put the price first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Pool Under Willows is what people call its atmosphere.
To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof beams, inglenooks, or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the florid carpet – everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century. And there are even informative prints on the walls, giving the history of the building back to that period.
In summer there is generally good air conditioning, and the Victorian layout of the place gives one plenty of elbow room. There are lots of places to sit in a booth or with your back to a wall, two bars, an app for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, an airy dining room with plenty of natural light.
In the Pool Under Willows it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a jukebox nor a PRS licence, and the landlord has put up signs requesting that patrons ‘respect others when using phones or other personal devices. Kindly turn the sound off or use headphones.’
All human life is here, young and old. The bar staff are all university students and are assiduous in the wiping of vacated tables – two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades.
Seven days a week you can get a good, solid lunch – for example, chicken tikka masala – for about £12.
The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have Murphy’s stout with it. I doubt whether as many as ten per cent of London pubs serve Murphy’s stout, but the Pool Under Willows is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a branded glass.
They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Pool Under Willows, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of Staropramen in a handleless glass. Apart from straight and chalice glasses, they have some of those pleasant dimpled jugs, which are now seldom seen in London.
The great surprise of the Pool Under Willows is its garden. You go through a narrow passage and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with chairs round them.
On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children.
Many as are the virtues of the Pool Under Willows, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.
And though, strictly speaking, they aren’t allowed to, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children – and therefore, to some extent, women – from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.
The Pool Under Willows is my ideal of what a Wetherspoon’s should be – at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country Spoon’s are slightly different.)
But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Pool Under Willows.
That is to say, there may well be a Spoon’s of that name, but I don’t know of it, nor do I know any Spoon’s with just that combination of qualities.
I know Spoon’s where the tables are always wiped but it’s hard to find one with a good outlook, others where you can get a good table but which are noisy and crowded, and others which would be quiet except that people ignore the rules and use their phones to watch videos, without headphones. As for gardens, offhand I can only think of three London Spoon’s that possess them.
But, to be fair, I do know of a few Spoon’s that almost come up to the Pool Under Willows. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect Spoon’s should have and I know one Spoon’s that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no high-ceilinged upstairs.
And if anyone knows of a Spoon’s that has corner tables, lots of windows, a garden, friendly barmaids and no fruit machines, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Moon Under Water.
After Orwell.
