Spoons

[South Bank exhibition site by night, with the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion in the centre and the Royal Festival Hall to the right. Catalogue ref: WORK 25/209/D1/FOB3836]

[Probably the original of the snap which finds its way into Wetherspoon News]

Over the holiday we acquired a copy of the Winter/Spring 2024/25 UK edition of the Wetherspoon News, from which I share some bits and pieces.

The magazine provides air time for a good number of Wetherspoon's outlets across the country. I dare say managers are invited to send in items of interest - charity events, 100th birthdays and the like.

We were interested to read about the large new outlet at the Sidings at Waterloo, noticed at reference 5. Named for a pavilion at the 1951 Festival of Britain, to be seen in the middle of the first of the snaps above, lifted from reference 6. All very arts and crafts: '... The pavilion was intended to display ‘British character and tradition’, a theme which the designers approached with a sense of humour and joy...'. One hopes that it was not just Tory spite which led to the subsequent clearance of most of the site.

Then that Epsom refurbishment had cost £1.375 million rather than the £0.5 million I had estimated at reference 3. A refurbishment which appeared to amount to a (tasteful) redecoration in the public area, but also included upgrading the toilets and the kitchens. This last including the addition of something called an open-gantry food hoist room. Unfortunately, while the people at reference 4 were clearly in the right business, it was not clear what exactly had been put into the kitchen here at Epsom. One might have thought an industrial version of a dumb waiter, but I did not spot anything which fitted that bill. Will I be able to persuade a team member to show me the contraption in question? Although thinking with my fingers, I dare say that would contravene the hygiene regulations.

The other thing that I noticed was the near absence of happy faces of colour among all the other customers being snapped. Wetherspoon seem to be active in the disability arena, having been better than average, for example, in the provision of disabled toilets for a long time, but maybe they are not as active in the diversity arena. Other magazines do much better.

PS: and while I am on, I might as well mention Gemini. BH thought that she had read that a Noel Coward play about luvvies in a care home was on television over the holiday and asked her smart television to find it for her, to no avail. Neither Bing nor Google did any better, at least on the search keys that I used. So I tried Gemini with 'There was a film on television over the holiday involving Noel Coward and retired actors & actresses in a care home. Can you tell me the name of the film please' - and while he would not have got many marks in a school for his answer, he did lead me to the right answer, which was that what BH saw was probably a listing for a BBC radio adaptation of the 1960 Noel Coward play 'Waiting in the Wings'. There was an Australian television adaptation, not that long after the original production, but I doubt whether that was on our telly. Not to be confused with various more recent, but quite different, offerings with the same title.

References

Reference 1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00268tt.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_in_the_Wings_(play).

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/08/plums.html.

Reference 4: https://www.hoistuk.com/products/food-industry-clean-room/.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/11/zelinsky.html.

Reference 6: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the-lion-and-unicorn-pavilion-legacies-of-the-1951-festival-of-britain/.