In the beginning there was… Bolton?

It was on the 15th April 2023 that the concept of Wetho Wanderers was created, as we sat in The Spinning Mule in Bolton. With the idea of this blog and our social media accounts having only just been born, we had no real plan in place so the photographs we took of the pub left a lot to be desired. For some reason, we considered a few portrait photos of the toilets and a long-distance shot of the bar taps (one of which humourously had the word ‘Stella’ scrawled on it in Sharpie) would suffice. Unsurprisingly, this one will need to be revisited in order for us to take some better photographs.

So with 260 days left of 2023, how did our adventure fare?

April, May & June

We got off to a very quick start, visiting 70 new pubs over these three months. The bulk of these were quite easy to tick off, covering those local to us in Nottinghamshire and with some pleasant summer day trips to Derbyshire and Leicestershire.

A rather spontaneous trip to Swindon allowed us to tick off all three pubs in Swindon – The Dockle Farmhouse, The Savoy and The Sir Daniel Arms.

A summer trip to Cornwall in May allowed us to tick off every Cornish Wetherspoons over a couple of days using Transport for Cornwall’s All Day ticket for just £5 each (keep your eyes peeled for posts about this coming this year!)

A weekend road trip in June took us down the East Coast, where we paid a visit to a few seaside ‘Spoons. Starting off in Hartlepool we ticked off a few North Yorkshire pubs in Redcar, Whitby and Scarborough before paying a visit to Bridlington in East Yorkshire. Our journey home the next day, after a rather glorious summer’s evening camping in a totally empty campsite, took us through Lincolnshire, where we covered six more pubs.

A trip to Milton Keynes gave us the chance to tick off the three local Wetherspoons – Wetherspoons, The Moon Under Water and Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party.

July, August & September

July started off with quite a few miles covered with a trip to Anglesey. Time constraints worked against us this weekend, though, and we only managed to tick off one Welsh Wetherspoon – The Black Bull Inn in Bangor.

The following week we took a trip down to Portsmouth where we caught the ferry to the Isle of Wight. Thanks to our tightness we’d booked the cheapest ferry available, which departed at 7AM and meant we had to leave at around 3AM. On any long journey we try to visit a few Wetherspoons en route, but in this case we’d have just looked like a couple of oddballs pressing our faces against the window of a closed pub. The two Spoons on the Isle of Wight – S Fowler & Co and The Man In The Moon – were quickly ticked off though, giving us our second fully-completed area after Cornwall.

After learning that The Six Chimneys in Wakefield would be closing for refurbishment, we decided to pay it a visit beforehand, hopefully for a sweet before-and-after comparison when it reopens. Having acquired the adjacent building and pumped £3million into the renovation, it should be quite an impressive reopening. This gave us the chance to visit a few other Yorkshire pubs, passing through Wakefield, Doncaster and Rotherham on our way home.

A weekend trip to Clacton-on-Sea ticked off Moon and Starfish, and a short trip through Colchester, Harwich and Ipswich ticked off a few more.

October, November & December

Our adventure slowed down quite considerably in the winter months. Having covered most of the Wetherspoons within a 30-mile radius, busy work schedules and short, cold days didn’t lend themselves brilliantly to day or weekend trips further afield.

An October trip to Lincoln, coinciding with some of the worst flooding of the year, was our only real outing, ticking off four Lincolnshire ‘Spoons on our travels. Our trip to Lincoln was well-timed, as later that evening Brayford Pool overflowed and cut off access to the Wetherspoon!

November gained the unfortunate honour of being the only month since we started this journey where we didn’t visit a new Wetherspoon.

December came close to earning itself a similar honour but we were to spend Christmas down in Cornwall, allowing us to pay a visit to Okehampton on the way, where we spent a night at the rather lovely The White Hart Hotel.

Summary

We ticked off a total of 102 Wetherspoons since we started back in April, averaging 2.75 pubs per week. The bulk of these were in the Midlands and South Yorkshire, with the rest coming from trips further afield, including just a single Welsh Spoons over in Bangor.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet and Google Maps, we’ve put together a map showing every Wetherspoon we visited in 2023, which you can view here. You can also take a look below, where we’ve highlighted the most Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western ‘Spoons we’ve visited, as well as the best and worst, according to our rating system.

The Coinage Hall in Helston is in fact the most Southern Wetherspoon. The Tremenheer in Penzance is the most Western on the mainland, but The Line Weaver in Cork is actually the most Western. The Bottle Kiln in Harwich is close, but not quite, the most Eastern (that’s in Lowestoft) whilst The Ward Jackson in Hartlepool is about 330 miles away from being the most Northern – we’ve got some work to do in that department!

The Best of 2023

Of the 102 we visited in 2023, only seven scored higher than 4.50. Of those, the top three consists of:

1st – The White House, Leicester (4.75)
2nd – The Yarborough Hotel, Grimsby (4.67)
3rd – Sandford House, Huntingdon (4.58)
3rd – Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party, Bletchley (4.58)

The Worst of 2023

At the other end of the scale, only four pubs scored lower than 2.00. Taking the unfortunate last place is The Red Lion, Skegness (1.25).

Statistics

Now for the juicy bit… analysing the numbers!

As you’re probably aware by now, we rate each of the pubs we visit out of five on three criteria – building, interior and toilets. You can read more about our rating system here. But, after some eight and a half months of rating Wetherspoons – is the system working?

As noted above, the lowest overall rating any pub has ‘earned’ is 1.25, whilst the highest is a well-deserved 4.75. So far, having sampled roughly an eighth of all Wetherspoons currently open, we’ve not yet found one deserving of full marks, nor one awful enough to receive a sub-1.25 score. It’s hard to imagine that in our sample so far we’ve already found both the best and worst Wetherspoon, so perhaps 2024 will be the year a new champion is crowned!

With the best pub (so far) being only 0.25 points away from the top score, but the worst being 1.25 away from the lowest (a stone cold zero), it begs the question – are we being too generous? Our average rating (across all 102 pubs visited in 2023) is 3.23, so based on our system, any pub rated lower than this is worse than average, and any pub higher is better than average.

And when you look at the distribution of scores we’ve allocated, it becomes clear that the lowly scores of 0, 0.5 and 1.0 are very rarely awarded. On only one occasion was a 0.5 awarded (to the particularly unpleasant female toilets in The Red Lion, Skegness) and only eight 1.0s have been awarded this year.

In reality, it seems our rating system is effectively 1.5 to 5.0. That would make the median 3.25, meaning our average rating is very close to what the middle score of this range.

It seems fair to conclude, then, that we’re somewhat positively biased in our scoring. We don’t like giving out 0.5s or 1.0s, and quite frankly it’s hard to imagine how we could ever give a dead zero – there would have to be a crater where the pub should be in order for us to give the building a zero. But isn’t a slight bias to be expected from a blog that calls itself Wetho Wanderers and is dedicated quite exclusively to visiting and reviewing Wetherspoons?

What’s next?

Well, the obvious answer to that question is more Wetherspoons! Hopefully we can tick off more in 2024 than we did last year, though of course those remaining are slightly further afield than the ones we were able to visit in 2023.

We’ve got a few trips planned; one down to Norwich quite soon, a trip over to Ireland in April, and another to Wales in the spring/summer. The plan is to ‘complete’ a few more counties this year. We’re close with a few – Derbyshire only requires a couple more visits, and some of the counties with fewer pubs like Buckinghamshire are close to completion too. The big challenge will be South Yorkshire, a huge county with well over 30 ‘Spoons!

After a busy January, you can hope to see consistency return to our blog and social media posts – we’ve got over 80 visited pubs that we haven’t yet posted reviews for, so we really need to get a move on with posting those!

All the best for 2024!