Remembering when motorway service stations were a destination in themselves

Tebay Services on the M6 in Cumbria has just been voted the best service station for dogs. For animals whose main thrill while travelling is sticking their heads out of the window and drooling, you wouldn’t think they were that fussy. But then no-one seems immune to the charms of a service station with its own farm shop. Charming and dog-friendly as Tebay is, it is not typical of the British service station experience.   

It’s 65 years since our first motorway services opened. These days they are all video games, phone covers and massage chairs, servicing minds and bodies craving diversion after hours of sitting in a car eating wine gums and being told to keep right in 38 miles. They were designed as an essential part of the motorway network when it was planned in the 1950s. Companies took them on with 50-year leases – businesses long since vanished: Blue Boar; Granada; Top Rank. 

Before that a chaotic network of pubs, tea shops and roadhouses (enormous complexes somewhere between a holiday camp club and a leisure centre) sprang up alongside the trunk roads that led between towns in the 1920s and ’30s. By contrast, the standardisation of large motorway services was designed to engender a sense of trust to the weary traveller. After all, there’s nothing more deflating on an epic drive to find the long-advertised services is just a garage with a microwave.  

What I really want with my motorway services is a bridge to nowhere. Back in 1959 the first two in Britain, at Watford Gap (some 67 miles from Watford, should you ever make that rookie error) and Newport Pagnell (name checked in The Smiths song Is It Really So Strange?), featured walkways across the road. They were merely a conduit to an identical building on the other side, and if you visit both – on outward and return journeys – it can feel like a very high-concept joke. 

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The next wave of service stations made a bit more of the bridge, by positioning everything in the middle, above the road. In the case of Leicester Forest East, this included a silver-service restaurant designed by the achingly fashionable Terence Conran.

This was a time when motorway travel had an air of glamour and mystery, just as airports had too; the bridge now a viewing platform, somewhere to stop and marvel. Families would even take days out to visit one, at Keele, say, or Knutsford. There you could have a posh meal above the road, gazing down at the traffic while devouring your prawn cocktail, wondering where all those other people were going to in such a hurry.  

Food is, of course, the second biggest draw of service stations, after the toilets. And it’s been one of the biggest changes, too. Once a motorway stop would have included a restaurant specially prepared for the task, a Little Chef, say, or a Happy Eater.

Little Chef alone built 100 restaurants between 1969 and 1973, but by the mid-2000s they’d begun to go under, losing out to high-street fast-food outlets that had colonised the big service stations. They are now run by Moto, RoadChef or Welcome Break, those plates of Olympic breakfasts and liver and bacon replaced by trays of McNuggets and vegan sausage rolls.   

Service station layout kept evolving too. Research in the late 1960s led to new designs that did away with the bridges altogether. These pavilions instead looked out onto fields, like at Leigh Delamere on the M4, which opened in 1972. But they were still modernist temples of Formica, aluminium and vinyl, designed for an era of lunar landers and futuristic dreams.

The ’80s, you won’t be surprised to learn, created service stations that no longer looked sleek and modern, but instead had the air of a historic barn – the ‘Tescobethan’ look so beloved of out-of-town supermarket designers. The best one of this sort I’ve visited was at Oswestry, where a small chunk of Milton Keynes appeared to have broken down, globe lights and pitched-roofed Burger King and all, finding itself semi-abandoned on the border between England and Wales.   

By the ’90s the service stations we’d recognise today had evolved: massive high-tech warehouses with swooshy roofs and lots of flexible space to fit in ever more concessions and gimmicks. The best thing I’ve seen at one recently was a tiny two-person glass pod in the middle of the shared tables of a Costa and Burger King, a place that businesses can hire for face-to-face meetings.

It was as if someone who has never worked in an office has tried to reverse engineer Zoom as a physical experience, where a sales call could be delivered among the Whoppers and where the privacy of a performance review could be elevated to performance art, observed by curious diners all around.   

Now, I’m not a dog, and so for me the greatest of motorway services is not at Tebay but instead near Lancaster at Forton on the M6. Here a concrete and glass hexagonal restaurant sits on top of a pillar, like a Cold War space needle.

It was designed by architects TP Bennett for Top Rank, and opened in 1965, around the same time as the revolving restaurant on London’s Post Office Tower. There’s something so optimistic about it, an entirely unnecessary flourish making what could have just been an anonymous nowhere into a memorable place. Naturally, it closed in the ’80s.   

Today’s service stations speak of a culture of anonymous convenience, cleverly designed to minimise human interactions in what are super-busy environments, perfect for an age of online interactions. The rule seems to be the larger and more sophisticated they become, the more confusing the taps and hand dryers in the toilets. Then there’s the tricky business of finding your way into or out of the car parks, a game of high-stakes jeopardy that can leave you cycling round huge gyratory roundabouts and heading back to the motorway without ever having been able to stop for that urgent wee. And all of us – dogs or humans – can agree that that is no kind of service at all.  

John Grindrod is a social historian of modern places.

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