Last week City A.M. attended the opening of the newest, biggest JD Wetherspoon – a truly British institution, you could say. But some still hate it (read here) and think it’s miserable. So let’s get to the cold hard truth:

Wetherspoons: Should we be proud or ashamed?

Proud: If the other option is a gastro pub, give me a Spoons any day of the week

For some, Wetherspoons is a signof all that is wrong in this world:cheap, corporate, bland and –dare I mention it – pro Brexit. But that’s never what Spoons will mean to me. When I was growing up in London, pints were already over £5 in nearly every establishment. In fact, you’d be lucky to stumble across a boozer that didn’t identify as a gastro pub in late 2015 when I turned 18. And guess what, we didn’t want a gastro pub. We wanted to get blink drunk off Purple Lagoons and drink more beer than there was liquid flowing through our bodies on a Friday night.

Only Spoons would let us. Spoons was cheap, reliable, familiar and friendly. It was the introduction to the pub. All life was at Spoons, and we embraced it. And it wasn’t just drunken chatter. Oh, no. Spoons actually encouraged conversations that might please my snobbish counterpart. Wetherspoon takes great care choosing, conserving and telling the stories of the buildings it occupies. Forest Hill Wetherspoons, a converted 1920s cinema, was infamous in my circle for its aesthetic beauty. Tooting was derided, rightly, as a dive. Learning, is what we were doing, about Art and even Architecture.

Even the Brexit propaganda that started appearing in 2016 was at least a conversation starter, and if you’re not able to read and disagree in a pub, then where else can you?

It’s easy to mock Spoons if you’re someone who can afford to spend £7 plus on a pint every other day of the week, or £19 on a gammon burger with chips. But newsflash: not everyone can – and that doesn’t mean drinking should be relegated to the home or a park bench.

Lucy Kenningham is a feature writer at City A.M. and proud Spoon-waving enthusiast

Ashamed: I’d rather drink tinnies under a bridge

Last week I annoyed at least three quarters of the internet when I suggested the new “mega-Spoons” at Waterloo Station was… not good. “Miserable” was the word I used. One redditor branded me the “Pied Piper of snobbery”, while others suggested my dislike of this soulless chain was owing to my “hatred of the working classes”, which felt a little off the mark considering I’m a working class Mancunian.

I have now been called upon to defend my position, and while I could level several legitimate arguments – a giant chain strangling under-pressure local pubs, the staunchly pro-Brexit views of its founder Sir Tim Martin – this isn’t really why I loathe Spoons. I would simply rather drink almost literally anywhere else, owing to the defiant, deliberate lack of atmosphere and fist-pumping celebration of mediocrity.

“But they are so cheap!” say the Spoons brigade. Sure, but not as cheap as buying a few tins of Polish lager and drinking them under a bridge. Sometimes it’s worth spending that little bit extra. “But some of them are really beautiful!” say others. And yes, a few are housed in lovely buildings – but you could set up a hot dog stand in St Pauls and it would still be a hot dog stand. The comedian Frank Skinner once described standing at a urinal and producing two intertwining streams which, from a certain angle, was “actually quite beautiful”. But it’s still just a bloke standing in a toilet about to splash his trousers, and this is exactly how I feel – in my soul – every time I drink in Wetherspoons.

Steve Dinneen is lifestyle editor at City A.M. and newly-crowned The Pied Piper of the Snobby

The Verdict: Grab a pitcher, friends

JD Wetherspoon is without doubt a national institution; so much indeed it’s earned itself its shiny, crockery epithet: Spoons. But like all things popular, it has its fair share of haters too. Mr Dinneen, our Pied Piper of the Snobby, is chief among these, and his case is reasonable: taking a lacklustre atmosphere and putting it in a listed building does not a fine pub make. Then again, as his combatant, the proud fist-pumper of mediocrity Ms Kenningham, who will not be lured by this eloquent piper’s tune, posits, the power of the atmosphere is just as much in the tavern goers’ own hands – and what better way to create atmosphere than 2-for-£15 pitchers? Mr Dinneen’s counter-suggestion that one might instead opt to drink some Polish lager under a bridge may suit a thrifty troll, but most, even cheapskates, would probably prefer to drink indoors – so pride for Spoons it is. Now that’s done, may I recommend a visit to the City’s own Wetherspoons for our both combatants, where they might grab a pitcher of Hawaiian Pipeline Punch, settle in, and talk about something else.