If you think of Motorway services, the chances are you have memories of super-larger car parks, boarded with a petrol station and a drab brutalist building housing toilets, fast food outlets, an amusement arcade, a phone accessories shop and almost certainly a ‘pop up concession’ somewhere on the concourse area.
But, if we rewind to when Motorway service stations first started to pop up across the U.K’s growing Motorway network, things were very different. Far from a necessity for those busting for the loo and with overpriced generic food, the early services were where people would go to meet, and even date!
In the same sort of way that out-of-town shopping villages exist now as a perfect place to park and meet and enjoy a meal and drink, service stations decades ago did much the same sort of thing. The hangover of that generation still exists now with some ‘services’ still retaining some of that architecture; domes and towers (often used as restaurants with an eye over the motorway and beyond) but since often long abandoned.
But prudent thinking by some site owners in the last 20 or so years has started to merge modern motorway services, with the sentiment of those original services and a more modern British phenomena – the farm shop.
Some more recently built services have created locations that people want to navigate to, not simply ‘having’ to use out of necessity. The excellent Gloucester services for example have ultra-modern, clean and eco-friendly buildings, surrounded by beautiful grounds where owners can park up and walk their dogs, before ordering fresh, non-fast food chain food. Their farm shops stock an abundance of local produce from artisan Gin, kitchenware, breads and deli items and scotch eggs. Yes, the Gloucester Service station scotch eggs are worth the drive on their own merits. But, add in an on-site butcher and this no longer even sounds like a service station.
Another services, Tebay (Westmorland) services on the edge of the Lake District, have built such an amazing reputation, that it even earnt its own TV series following the day-to-day story of the facility and its staff. Once again, the farm shop and fresh food are centre piece, and you soon forget after parking up that you were on your way to or from the North of England on (possibly) a long road trip. It really does feel a world away from some of the very generic 1970’s/1980’s built services with their stressy hustle and bustle and unimaginative refreshments.
Some of other favourites include ‘Fleet’. Hear us out here! Based on the M3, not that long after you may have left the busy M25, Fleet has been re-modelled over recent years since one of the restaurants suffered a fire in 2016. But then rebuild has made the facility seemingly more ‘airy’ and less claustrophobic. But we also like the forest type planting around these services and despite being next to a motorway, it always makes us feel like we are on the way to, or from, a holiday when we park up here.
But our overall favourite Motorway Services ‘feature’ has to be…a road bridge! Maybe it’s nostalgia, or maybe we just like the architectural feat of a bridge spanning traffic speeding at 70mph just metres below, but when we envisage a British Motorway Services, our vision always has a raised walkway included.
