Pub history

Wetherspoon Express

This was formerly RAF Speke, now named after Liverpudlian musician John Lennon. When Wetherspoon’s chairman, Tim Martin, opened his first pub in north London, in 1979, he named it Wetherspoons, after a Mr Wetherspoon – his New Zealand primary school teacher, the reasoning being that Mr Wetherspoon was too nice to be running Tim’s particular class and couldn’t control it; Tim thought to himself that, likewise, he couldn’t control his first pub, so considered the name appropriate.