In accordance with tradition, I am in the grips of a savage and well deserved hangover as I enter The Lion & The Unicorn, the massive new Spoons that opened yesterday at Waterloo Station.
It takes its name from the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion at the 1951 Festival of Britain, a celebration of the country’s achievements in science and art that took place nearby (the lion and unicorn being the rather ambitious symbols of England and Scotland, respectively).
The festival attracted some eight million visitors, which, judging by the crowd already propping up the bar here, will be close to the pub’s average daily lunch service.
This mega-Spoons, too, will celebrate a great British tradition: getting trashed on (relatively) cheap pints on a Tuesday morning. Here, however, is where the similarities come to an abrupt end. According to the National Archives, the Festival of Britain was a “spectacular scene” featuring “hundreds of people swarming around futuristic-looking walkways,” with the pavilion its triumphant centrepiece. It was a modernist wonder, a “glittering plate-glass” palace that towered over the Thames, a symbol of the country’s post-war reinvention. Inside were works from the arts and crafts tradition showcasing “British character”, including porcelain doves escaping from elaborate cages, mighty straw lions and murals themed around such lofty topics as “worship”, “democracy” and “the law”.
The new Wetherspoons in Waterloo Station
The Spoons that takes its name, on the other hand, is an anonymous space in an anonymous section of Waterloo station – nestled beside a Brew Dog and soon to be neighbours with Nandos and Lucky Voice – with features so anonymous I’m struggling to remember them only minutes after having spent an afternoon there.
And this, charitably, might be the point. Spoons is less a chain of pubs than it is an hermetically-sealed microcosm of founder Tim Martin’s interior world, a sad pastiche of pub culture that replicates the objects we all recognise – tables, carpets, people standing around necking pints of Carlsberg – but strips them of their inherent meaning. The result is an uneasy liminal space, a vision of purgatory if purgatory were just people drinking far too early in the day.
The room is a long, thin affair with a view of a sagging Topshop billboard hanging outside a condemned building, which feels pertinent for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s light and airy and features tables stacked with far too many condiments. The carpet (they’re different in each pub; I have a book with pictures of them all that mysteriously appeared on my shelf one night) is made up of brown and beige and blue swirls and dots, and is about 30 minutes away from absorbing enough beer to really complete that classic Spoons look.
The bar is dominated by those big, sweating taps; gleaming pedestals of ruin. It takes ages to get served even though there are as many staff as customers at the bar. One bartender is just picking up pint pots, examining them and putting them back down, as if he’s experiencing glassware for the first time, having previously consumed liquids in his cupped hands. He pours the woman in front of me the worst pint of Bud Light I have ever seen, fully a third foam, and contemplates it for a second before handing it to her. She wordlessly accepts it because this is Wetherspoons and, really, what do you expect?
I get chatting to a man called Daryl, who has come all the way from Camden just to check out the new Spoons. “If there’s beer involved, I’m there,” he chuckles, before yelling at a man who tries to cut into the queue. “This is my manor,” he says. “We take no bullshit”.
I want to sit by the window to get a better look at the billboard so I diligently clear my table of the last occupant’s dirty plates. A woman wearing a “World’s Best Wife Since 2012” t-shirt walks by. Today, these are my people.
I scan the QR code on the table and order a chicken tikka masala: the connoisseur’s choice. It arrives alongside my second pint, and the pair combine to do a fine job of dulling the lingering remnants of my hangover. The curry tastes aggressively adequate.
A lady who looks like she might be the manager says the pub served its first pint at 8am, after a small queue had formed outside. I wonder if those people had been waiting for trains and happened upon the pub through sheer serendipity or, like Daryl, had come to Waterloo for the sole purpose of drinking in Wetherspoons at 8am. Deep down I already know the answer.
There is something absurd about reviewing a new Wetherspoons. It’s like reviewing a Tuesday or the concept of ennui. Spoons is inevitable, a mildly disappointing constant, as much a part of life as trousers or haircuts. You already know what The Lion & The Unicorn is like; you have always known, on an instinctual level, the way Plato reckoned we were born with the sum total of knowledge and just forgot it all. It is Wetherspoons and that’s really all there is to it. I will probably come here often.