Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Tuesday the 3rd of September,

and I'm in the pub already. But not just any old pub, this is a brand new station facility

at one of the UK's busiest stations, London Waterloo. It's the Lion and Unicorn by Weather Spoon. Yes, Spoons has made it to Waterloo.

I'm in the company of the man who's overseen this whole project. He's Barry Brewster. I can see what you did with your name there, Barry.

And he is regional manager for JD Weatherspoon.

It's a beautiful pub stretching for half of the area of the old Euro star terminal.

An impressive piece of work.

We're very, very pleased and very excited to be here.

We try to get into as many transport hubs as we can.

We're in quite a view already across London,

but this is by far in the way the biggest project we've done in the last several years.

We tried to bring an individuality to, I think, to all of our stations and all of our transport hubs.

So we try to provide great value food, consistency, good value beer, great range of products. We're a freehouse, so we'll sell

Green King products, we'll sell full of products, we'll sell a broad range of wines, yeah, foods,

which we're known for. So we'll sell as much as we think we can sell to the customers and

passengers who want those offerings, whether it's families or stagdos or hendos, individual business people or

travelling people. So we try to be a broad church. A pub in a railway station or an airport, though,

is always going to be very different from a JD-weather spoon in your local high street. I think in the

local high street, you do get a local lunchtime trade, regular morning trade and evening trade. But I think in the transport hub, you get all of those things, but you get a whole lot more. That's part of your demographic, but you get a significant amount of people traveling. And some people are here for a day. Some people are just traveling in for a week. Some people only be here once in a lifetime. There's some Canadians in this morning, some Australians in this morning. there were some people from France in this morning travelling around, and they're just coming to the UK for once in a lifetime, and we're just here to try and provide an experience for them, an enjoyable experience, and hopefully a memorable experience. They may never heard a Wetherpoon, they may never heard the Lion and Unicorn, but hopefully by the time they've left us, they will know what Watherswin is all about. The lion and the unicorn.

That sounds a bit like something out of Narnia.

What's it all about?

There was a festival of Britain back in 1951 on the South Bank.

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