25 August 2016
Fading Icons – No Service
If only they were all like Tebay.
by J.R.Thomas
You really can’t avoid them, at least without turning off the motorway. Perhaps it is truer to say, we don’t want to avoid them, driven up the exit ramp by hunger or nagging necessity or that insistent flashing dashboard light which means “Refuel Immediately Or Be Towed Off In Disgrace”. So much easier to slide up that welcoming tarmac, than come off at the next mini spaghetti junction and then hunt anxiously down all the possible exit routes for, maybe, just maybe, a Sainsbury, a Little Chef, a Waitrose (ah! Bliss), or a Lidl (lawks!).
Your correspondent once joined a cooperative of high-mileage drivers sick of motorway service areas, and anxious to introduce market rigours and competition to the Mwayservice monopoly, to co-write a book called “Just Off the Motorway”. It recorded all alternative one-stop offerings of food, loo’s, and fuel within two miles of each junction of the UK’s eastern motorways. Anticipating national coverage within months and annual additions in perpetuity, we began making notes everywhere we went, and selecting suitably sporty vehicles so as to carry out our research ever more swiftly. It bombed, of course. It was then, and still is, so much easier to dash straight off the motorway and speed back on. In the end we had to give them away. No doubt a few still exist, unused, hidden in that dark and terrible place under the passenger seats where sweet wrappers and oily sticky things end up.
Service areas. We use them and we hate them. And the service station operators know that we hate them. They seem to want us to hate them. They charge us for parking there for a single minute over two hours – charge us for parking on land acquired by our own government over which they have somehow acquired monopoly rights. The signs on the motorway say “Take a break – don’t drive tired”. “Too right,” say the service area operators, “Pull in and sleep and wake up to a wacking great fee”. They charge premium prices for fuel in outlets that have the easiest delivery access in Britain – straight off the motorway – and the highest sale volumes. And the food – when what you most need are light appetising snacks or even somewhere covered and comfortable for you to bring your own, they offer Kansas Fried Horrors and McBurger with treble fries. Vegetarian? “No demand, mate”. Vegan? “You what?” KFC it is then, and for the next two hundred and fifty miles, a carload of people are trapped in the brooding aftermath of a bucket of twenty legs and four breasts of a truly remarkable, though long dead, chicken.
Recently, your correspondent, with a car-load of slightly damp walkers returning from North Wales, became embroiled in a traffic jam on the M40. Salvation appeared, a service station (we will not name and shame but very close to the River Cherwell). Further salvation, a M&S franchised food outlet and sign saying “Riverside Walk and Picnic Area”. Are motorway services really improving? We deployed the M&S credit card (no loyalty points, it’s a franchise) and threaded, carefully, picnic in hand, between the on-site Happy Sleeper and steel-clad ends of various sheds to the picnic area and riverside walk. We weren’t quite sure what to expect – dreaming meadows, punts, ducks, perhaps? Well, a river at least. Maybe there was one somewhere; the River Cherwell, if not forced into an underground culvert, must lurk in those parts somewhere. Not where we could find it, but two picnic tables there were indeed, and charming views of doggie owners giving their pets a break. You don’t want to go there. No, really, you don’t want to go there.
This was not how it was meant to be. Early motorways, free from barriers and lighting, and indeed pretty much devoid of cars, were punctuated by architect-designed concrete scaled-down models of the National Theatre. That at Lancaster (South) (formerly Forton) is a wonderful example of the genre; concrete abstractions clustered at the foot of a space-age tower which gives magnificent views of the traffic pressing ever onwards many feet below. Or it would, if not closed to the public. These were all part of brave new twentieth-century Britain, a world in which we would get to places so much easier and faster, pausing in these ground-bound space-stations for the refuelling of ourselves and our streamlined conveyances. But somehow it did not stay like that for long. Any architectural involvement in design seems to have been dispensed with in subsequent generations of service stations, which are now simple but enormous sheds, rearrangeable internally at will to suit modern shopping and eating trends, or, really, the requirements of whoever will pay the highest rent. Only the toilets stay the same, they produce no rent (yet) and thus receive no investment. And not a lot of cleaning.
It does not have to be like this. The modern trend is not to have services on the motorway at all, but locate them very close to existing junctions. It is noticeable that standards are higher at such locations – even if there is no immediate competition. Once the motorist has got himself to an alternative network of roads he is probably more inclined to look around for what is best, and best value. But even on the motorway, it does not have to be like this.
Not too far north of Lancaster (South) (formerly Forton) is Tebay services, on the very edge of the eastern Lake District National Park. It is a revelation. Even its website is a revelation. It was built and is still owned by a nearby farming family who run it exactly as any traveller would want a motorway services area to be run. The food is excellent, and locally sourced wherever possible. The buildings are built from stone and wood, deployed in the local vernacular. The staff are cheerful and seem to be happy in their work. The prices are no higher, sometimes lower, than other motorway service areas run by large chains who do not maintain such standards and yet must have huge economies of scale in purchasing. It is worth driving up the M6 just to visit it. Or indeed along the M5 near Gloucester, which services area Tebay have just acquired.
So why are not all service stations like this? Most operators simply do not want travellers lingering around the place. They want the traveller dollar, quickly, and then space for the next, and the next, and the next. They don’t care about creating a nice impression so as to get your repeat business, because chances are you will have to call again whether you like it or not, if you are driving that way. And here maybe is the real rub. They don’t worry about the competition because there isn’t any. Drive on another thirty miles, but unless that gets you to Tebay, the next will be just as bad. They have a captive audience who just want to spend and go, and go. It is a monopolist’s dream, handed to them on a pair of slip roads.
So, here is a suggestion for Mrs May, the rising heroine of the common person. Introduce competition at every services, split up the sites and lease the bits to a multiplicity of competing operators, with no group being allowed to operate more than one outlet per services area. Or allow them to stay as single sites but say that no operator can run more than three, and that they must each be at least eighty miles apart. The operators pay very big rents for these sites – because they are monopolies with guaranteed customer throughput. But in competitive hands, anxious to drum up trade and with alternative offerings, they can generate even more income, because we would actually want to spend time there. Enforce the market economy on them; what could be a finer demonstration of Conservative principles and help to ordinary people?
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