From a distance, the M6 services that sit 10 miles to the south of Lancaster are an impressive sight. Opened in 1965 by the Rank Organisation — the British leisure conglomerate whose films always began with an oiled Adonis banging a gong — they were hyped to the public as a “motorport”, replete with a 65ft high observation deck. According to a history of motorway service areas by the architectural historian David Lawrence, it was intended to be “reminiscent of an airport control tower, thereby making positive associations
with the most exclusive form of transport”.
These were the short-lived days when motorway services had grill rooms, carveries and an abiding modernist flash: the idea , it seems, was to allow ordinary British motorists to eat, pee and fill up their cars with petrol in thrillingly futuristic surroundings — and, while they were there, to admire the view of nearby Morecambe.
Up close, unfortunately, the facilities known as Lancaster (Forton) now have an unlikely whiff of communist eastern Europe. The tower has long since fallen foul of health and safety regulations, and is closed to the public. The oppressive footbridge that links the carriageways is in dire need of redecoration. On the northbound side, with its “projecting deck restaurant” and “feature staircase”, 40 or so people are making the most of the “Big Moto” breakfast (sausages, bacon, eggs, hash browns, baked beans, tomato, fried bread and two slices of toast — £8.99). Anyone who has ever stopped at Britain’s less luxurious service stations will be familiar with the scene: the faint smell of vegetable oil and detergent, the distant bleeps of one-armed bandits and video games, and the abiding idea that the good life is happening elsewhere.
However, there is news of change. Chris Taylor, the general manager and a service-station veteran of some 30 years , is about to begin a comprehensive refit, taking in fresh interiors, new toilets, a WHSmith shop and a branch of Marks & Spencer’s off shoot Simply Food, with its all wood flooring, nice sandwiches and boxed salads.
“It’s about brands now — your coffee shops, your retail outlets,” he tells me . “That’s the way forward. We have to offer the public what they want: they want choice, and they want the brands. And that’s what we’re doing.”
In the midst of such changes, currently being accelerated by a nationwide £30m refurbishment programme launched by the Moto chain, there is one casualty. Four years ago, Moto’s services contained 28 Little Chef outlets; now, there are 14. The company’s contract with Little Chef expires at the end of 2009, and what will happen after that is a matter of commercial confidentiality, though devotees of such specialities as the “Olympic breakfast bap” should probably not get their hopes up. The Little Chef on the southbound side at Lancaster closed last November, sent on its way by the new gospel of “grab and go”.
“We had to change,” says Taylor’s deputy, Steve Gray. “People don’t want to spend 20 minutes or half an hour eating any more. It’s all in and out and go.”
You instantly sense the crude outlines of the change: whereas once there
were lengthy stops for a full English, three cups of tea and an ice cream for the kids, the motorways are being belatedly ushered into the age of macchiatos, skinny muffi ns and the sandwich-cum-signifier for Blair’s Britain known as a panini. Even Little Chef has embraced the revolution: its remaining motorway branches are much the same as they ever were, but increasing numbers of the 200-odd roadside outlets that were recently saved from closure now feature branches of a faux-Starbucks called Coffee Tempo (slogan: “Great food on the move!”).
Compared with the experience of motorway dining scratched into the memory of anyone who lived through the 1970s — stops operated by Granada, Kenning, Top Rank and Trusthouse Forte; crazily priced food that was reliably inedible; the sporting chance of rolling up for lunch only to find that the services had been done over by a travelling football “firm” - all this is a good thing. Straw-polling underlines the point: at Southwaite services on the M6, for example, I asked a pinstriped company director
named Andrew, en route from Wetherby to Dundee, how he chose where to stop. “I like anywhere with an M&S,” he shot back. “You get a sandwich you can eat and you’re not going to get shafted.”
Still, for all its dazzle, the future into which the motorways are moving comes with two caveats. First, as a visit to the independently run website motorwayservices.info proves, we are some distance from the grab-and-go idyll we are being promised.
“The soup was cold, [and] the chips were cold, hard and probably reheated
numerous times,” writes a disappointed visitor to Moto’s Birchanger Green services on the M11. “The fish and chicken were tasteless. I have eaten better meals in mountain refuges.”
On the page devoted to the M4 services just inside Wales at Magor, there is a mobile-phone photograph of a “deep fill” sandwich featuring two curling pieces of white bread and a solitary slice of ham.
Second, culturally speaking , this extension of high-street consumerism may have costs as well as benefits. For those of us who have a rose-tinted attachment to the Britain that existed before capitalism ran riot, the motorways are like a last redoubt. From those roadsign icons of beds, petrol pumps and teacups, to the general absence of adverts, they conjure up the gentler world to which Margaret Thatcher laid waste. Names that sounds Betjemen-esque are part of the magic: Clacket Lane, Hartshead Moor, Pont Abraham.
There are few pop songs about British motorways, though tellingly they crop up in the legend of those great English romantics, the Smiths. On Is It Really So Strange?, the tale of a lovelorn journey from north to south and back again, the final verse rises to the anguished complaint that “I left my bag in Newport Pagnell” (on the M1, and these days run by Welcome Break, with a
very non-Smithsian branch of KFC).
The late John Peel once told of meeting Morrissey further up the same motorway at an unspecified services south of Newcastle, and therefore on
the A1(M): “I was sitting there having a cup of tea when he came over, said hello and then to my astonishment announced that this was his favourite motorway service station. I think that was taking pickiness a bit too far.”
For better or worse, the pinched, grey world in which Morrissey found such solace seems to be on the way out. Just before Christmas, the Highways Agency launched what it pithily called a “Consultation on Policy for Service Areas and Other Roadside Facilities on Motorways and All-Purpose Trunk Roads in England”, built on the inevitable modern mantra of “greater choice”.
As usual, you could be forgiven for translating those two words as “increased cash for big corporations”, though some people think there may be room for a more enlightened vision.
Edmund King, executive director of the RAC Foundation, may agree that the arrival of names such as M&S is driving up quality, but he also points out that the “outstanding produce” at the independent Tebay services on the M6 proves it is possible to succeed without going brand-mad.
“What we would like to see is more French-style picnic areas interspersed between main service areas,” he says, “with basic toilet facilities,
benches and tables.”
None the less, the big motorway firms are getting very excited indeed. Martin Grant, the genial chief executive of Roadchef, is probably their loudest advocate. He arrived in the industry three years ago, having worked for Allied Domecq, Marks & Spencer and Asda. "And I was absolutely staggered,” he says, “when I discovered this incredible bundle of rules and regulations that had been put in place about 50 years ago, when there were hardly any cars and hardly any motorways. Things seemed to be stuck in a kind of time warp.”
Aside from the government’s very British insistence that service areas must avoid anything “which would lead to a site becoming a destination in its own right”, he has two main beefs: restrictions that mean only one commercial
logo can be stuck on motorway signs (already stretched by his own company’s rebranding as “Roadchef Costa Coffee”), and that no service area is allowed to grow bigger than 5,000 square feet.
On the first count, Grant has begun a vocal campaign to allow the motorway companies to advertise their wares more comprehensively, by doing away with the old-fashioned icons — “like Egyptian hieroglyphics”, he says — and replacing them with the all-important brands.
When it comes to limits on space, he knows exactly what he is after. “Ten thousand square feet would keep me quiet,” he says. “Shopping is the number-one pastime in this country but for some reason, motorway service areas are restricted from participating in it. I’d like a bit more space to widen the range — some clothes, a wider range of records, books, confectionery,
more snack foods, more of what I call motorway paraphernalia. You know the kind of stuff we sell: games, remote-control hovercraft, things like that.”
So, welcome to the future: piled-up novelty items, M&S, WHSmith, Costa Coffee and cutprice polo shirts (plus the odd “French-style picnic area”).
According to the motorway industry, the upshot of such innovations will warm the heart of even the most hardened anti-consumerist — for when the service areas are made more alluring, people will pull in more often, and
we will thus see the end of the British habit of driving too long without stopping. Maximised profits and reduced road deaths: what, really, is the problem?
Still, there is another possibility. Before I set off up the M6, I re-read a chapter from 45, the anthology-cum-memoir written by Bill Drummond,
the pop-cultural eccentric who cofounded the KLF. This story is about the occasion in 1998 when he and two accomplices drove round the M25 for 25 hours, “to find out where it leads”. Drummond falls asleep in the passenger
seat, and dreams of a Britain in which the tyranny of the car has been avenged, and our motorways sprout a new society. “In the future,” he writes,
“the crusties, the ravers without hope, the feral underclasses will live on the M25 in broken-down buses, discarded containers, packing cases and anything else that can be procured for nowt and provide shelter against the rains. The M25 will be like one of those forgotten canals behind the
backstreets of Brum, stagnant and dank, fit only for dead cats and stolen shopping trollies, until it is ripe for future heritage culturalists to proclaim
its worth as a site of special interest.”
It’s an interesting prospect. But for the time being, who fancies a panini?
