I feel that way about Wetherspoons.

Now Wetherspoons do great beers, they do fantastic food at sensible, family friendly prices, and they don't do loud shouty music often... but they're generic. You can go into a Wetherspoons in London and find exactly the same fayre as a Wetherspoons in Skegness.

Rarely now are the pubs being called by their proper names... the one nearest us is actually called 'The Millers Well' but is universally known as the Wetherspoons opposite the town hall. Then there's the big Wetherspoons in Stratford (E15), or the little one in Forest Gate. These are respectively, the Golden Globe or ?the Cutter (can't actually remember but it is some ship or other).

Everywhere you go now, you get huge companies taking over places and turning them into generic, cloned, identical places, where you are offered the same food, the same selection of beers and the same 'serve 'em quick and get 'em out' style of service. It's not just the pub names that are contrived (the 'Slug and [insert vegetable] chain springs to mind) but the whole 'friendly local' aspect that's as fake as the plastic beams and Chinese repro horse brasses.

LTS


Some of the contrived names are amusing - the Frog and Radiator is a jolly juxtoposition of the sublime and ridiculous, but others are just plain