Value for money at Spoons ... that’s elementary!

ON New Year’s Eve, an old friend from Birmingham (Tim Sherwood) told me about a JD Wetherspoon pub he had visited, trading under the same name as the school we both went to in the 1970s – Bishop Vesey.

Tim was taken aback – in a good way – by the prices that the Bishop Vesey pub, in Sutton Coldfield and no more than a two-mile walk from the school, charged for its beer. Three pints in the Bishop Vesey, he said, cost him no more than what he would sometimes pay for just one pint in London.

Although I’m not a frequent visitor to JD Wetherspoon establishments, I did once consume a dirt-cheap breakfast at The Peter Cushing pub in Whitstable, Kent, after completing the local parkrun. Cushing was famous for his performances as Baron Frankenstein and Doctor Van Helsing in a string of scary Hammer Horror movies. He was also a brilliant Sherlock Holmes, above, before spending the last years of his life in Whitstable.

Cushing would probably have mixed feelings about the JD Wetherspoon pub being situated in the town’s old Oxford Cinema. But I’m sure that if he were still around today, he would doff his deerstalker hat in the direction of the pub group’s chairman and founder Tim Martin – now a knight of the realm.

Whatever you may think of Martin, he has built a brilliant business based on providing customers with excellent value for money – a godsend during the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. The company’s shares have also performed well over the past year. Given a choice between a cooked JD Wetherspoon breakfast and a small investment in its shares, I would opt for the latter. As Sherlock would say: ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’