![]() Then you sit down and look – not out on to a brave new road – but down into your phone, scrolling with one hand while shovelling fast food with the other.Īt Newport Pagnell, the bridge across the road now looks more like a dare than modernity. No 60s-style table service: you queue up to order or do so from a very of-this-time machine. Leicester Forest East and Newport Pagnell are operated by Welcome Break – much the same as Roadchef, except Burger King replaces McDonald’s, there is Chopstix Noodle Bar instead of Chozen, Starbucks instead of Costa. ![]() The food court space is shared with other franchises. Today you can still eat fish above the motorway at Leicester Forest East, but it comes – with chips – from Harry Ramsden’s. ![]() I am beginning to understand why my own early long-car-journey food memories don’t involve motorway service stations at all, but sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, unwrapped from tinfoil on a windy grass bank. Imagine it – sitting in modernist Conranian splendour with E-Type Jaguars roaring underneath, while women dressed as cabin crew served you cod in parsley sauce. And the restaurant, designed by Terence Conran, was on the bridge, with waitresses in airline-style uniforms. It was another bridge services, run by the Ross Group in Grimsby with a fresh delivery of fish every day. This shift upwards reached its peak 30-odd miles north of Watford Gap, at Leicester Forest East, which opened with the second phase of the M1 in 1966. Quickly, the motorway experience shifts away from the Blue Boar cafeteria idea to a much more sensory experience.” “Forte introduced chefs to prepare fresh food, which would be cooked in front of the diners while they were sitting on stools at a long bar. “There was this incredible modernity just in the buildings, and that began to give an uplift to the dining experience,” says Lawrence. Newport Pagnell, designed by Owen Williams, had a pedestrian bridge across the road that was based on a Chicago model. It was run by the Italian Forte catering dynasty, who realised that a bit of glamour was essential to captivating the diner, and would go on to run smart hotels around the world.Ī postcard featuring Newport Pagnell, from the 1960s. Newport Pagnell, which opened soon after, 23 miles to the south (it was actually the first to open to all traffic Watford Gap was originally just for trucks), was posher. “Some families would have stopped – middle-class or upper-working-class families who either had cars through their jobs or were able to purchase one.”īut Watford Gap was never glamorous. “It would have been business travellers dining on expense accounts,” says Lawrence. It wasn’t the cross-section of British society it is today more a place for the upwardly mobile. “Grilled ham and other grilled meats, vegetables, fairly straightforward desserts, puddings and custards, fruit flans, ice-cream … that kind of thing,” says Lawrence. It was a stopover for bands on the road – the Beatles, the Stones, Pink Floyd, Dusty Springfield, the Eagles. It was a place for nocturnal motorcyclists to speed to as fast as their machines would carry them on three lanes free of traffic. And for their cars – more prone to breakdown than today’s – to have a rest, too. Originally run by a company called Blue Boar, it was a place for drivers to stop for the human necessities: tea and a pee. It also marks a moment between two eras, with the service station being a milestone in Harold Wilson’s vision of a journey to modernity (as well as a then-new 24-hour experience for the people who stopped there). It is the place where, traditionally, south-east England ends and the Midlands and the north begin (or vice versa, of course, depending on whether you are northbound or southbound) it is a gap between two hills where the road was squeezed in next to the canal and the railway. Watford Gap is significant for several reasons. Not terrible, but gloopy, unsurprising, uninteresting … OK, quite terrible. I opt for the red Thai vegetables with rice – £8 with prawn crackers and a ginger beer. “Does teriyaki stand for terrible, hahaha?” asks a businessman in front of me, who is on his way to the NEC in Birmingham. I choose Chozen because I have never had one before. The choice of food is: McDonald’s the Fresh Food Cafe, where there are more burgers, fish and chips or curry or Chozen Noodle. “A bit of rain never hurt anyone,” he says, cheerfully.Ī big part of Britain is here – not just car owners stopping to refuel, but all the people working. A man with a beard and a Maccy D’s meal sits down there anyway. Inside, water drips on to the floor an employee mops up, then deploys a “Caution: wet floor” sign. The building – designed by the Odeon cinemas architect Harry Weedon – looks tired, with tufts of insulation sprouting from the roof at the back. Today, Watford Gap services is operated by the Roadchef group.
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