It has been a place of dubious welcome for countless drivers and a favoured late-night haunt of 1960s pop stars including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but now Britain’s oldest motorway service station, Watford Gap, faces demolition under plans to revamp the site for a new electric era.
Located at the traditional gateway to the north – or for those driving from the Midlands and north-west turning from the M6 on to the M1, a first grim intimation of the south-east – the services have had a unique place in the country’s cultural as well as geographical landscape.
The unprepossessing squat buildings either side of the M1 in Northamptonshire, hastily erected for motorists to refuel when the UK’s first major motorway opened in 1959, are now set to give way for multi-storey buildings and hundreds of charging points for electric vehicles. The owner, Roadchef, has submitted extensive redevelopment plans, pending negotiations with the Department for Transport to extend their lease.
Originally known as the Blue Boar, the name of the local petrol station that grew into a huge business when the motorway sprang up, its 24-hour offering made it a big draw for those seeking late-night action.
Ministers initially deliberated for months over whether the services should be allowed to serve alcoholic drinks (to the indignation of the Guardian, which declared in 1960 that “there can be no doubt but that the proper decision be to forbid the sale of intoxicants on all motorways”).
Despite the eventual ban, it became a popular late-night haunt for rock and pop stars on tour. An autograph book auctioned off in 2009 by a former Watford Gap nightshift worker contained the signatures of Sir Paul McCartney and most of the original Stones, including Brian Jones, as well as the Eagles and Dusty Springfield.
“It was a cultural landmark by the mid-1960s,” said Dr David Lawrence of Kingston University, the author of Food on the Move: the Extraordinary World of the Motorway Service Area. In an era of pubs closing at 11pm and little traffic, Watford Gap could lure people up from the bright lights of swinging 60s London.
“There were effectively no speed limits and no traffic at the time” for those travelling up, Lawrence said. He was told by the late Gerry Marsden, of the Pacemakers fame, that Jimi Hendrix did indeed assume that the service station was a nightclub when invited along. “Gerry said to Jimi, ‘Once we’ve done the gig at the 100 Club on Oxford Street, let’s go to party at the Blue Boar,’” he said.
The government had only intended service stations to be there for “a tea and a pee”, said Lawrence. “But the operators realised they had a captive audience on the motorway who they could dazzle with 24-hour life – it was from them that the glamour arose.”
That glamour, he added, “had pretty much died out by 1970 when service stations and motorways became much busier, and vandalism meant they weren’t nice places to be.”
By 1971, it was enough of an institution to feature in the Egon Ronay restaurant guide, but distinguished itself by forcing the critic to produce a new rating below the one-star – “appalling”. The guide decried its “tasteless beans, dreadful cakes, indescribable tea”.
Refurbishments and additions have long changed the interior, if not improved the look of the exterior, but even those who champion modern buildings appear relaxed about its demolition. Oli Marshall, of the Twentieth Century Society, said that despite Watford Gap’s “intangible cultural heritage” it was “never a very architecturally distinguished building in the first place so we probably shouldn’t be too nostalgic about its loss”.
He added: “Rather than preserve the building itself, we’d advocate recording and celebrating some of the amazing stories – from a stop-off point for cramped family car journeys, to a meeting place for travelling rock’n’roll bands.”
Now Watford Gap, like Bob Dylan at Newport (festival, not Pagnell), is about to rip up its roots to go electric. A spokesperson for Roadchef said the company would “significantly increase EV charging capacity”, adding: “We’re proud to run Britain’s most iconic service station [and] the site needs to evolve to ensure it’s fit for the future of road travel.”
“It’s shoehorned between a river, a trainline and the M1, and you can only expand so much,” said enthusiast Rich Cross of Motorway Services Online. Roadchef was one of the last operators to offer 1960s-style sit-down catering, he said: “They do let you sit down and get your fish and chips and mushy peas still.”
But, he added, times were changing: “Everyone wants grab and go food – and they have had to roll with it.”
