Watford Gap Services M1 - Motorway Services Information Watford Gap Services M1 Other ratings from visitors to the site Truckers Type: Separate facilities for each carriageway, but linked by a pedestrian footbridge Operator: RoadChef Eat-In Food: Northbound: Costa, Fresh Food Cafe, McDonald's.

Southbound: Costa, Restbite, The Burger Company Takeaway Food / General: WHSmith Other Non-Food Shops: Fone Bitz, Cotton Traders (Northbound only) Picnic Area: yes Children's Playground: Yes Cash Machines in main building: Yes (transaction charge applies) Parking Charges: Free for the first 2 hours, then the following charges apply for up to 24 hours Cars £10 HGV £21 HGV with £10 food voucher £23 Caravans/Medium Goods Vehicles/Large Motor Homes £21 Other Facilities/Information: HSBC, National Westminster Cash Machines, Toilets Including Disabled And Baby Changing Facilities, Shower, Amusements Motel: Days Inn Watford Gap services - Motorway Services Online, Watford Gap | service stations Motorway Services Online Watford Gap Motorway Services Area M1 (most facilities 1960, rebuilt 1980s) Previous operators: Two sites located between junctions, connected by a pedestrian footbridge. Ratings Foursquare Possibly the most famous service station name in the country - so it's a bit of a shame that it looks no different from most others.

Still, given that it has been there for almost 60 years, it's quite an achievement that it's able to keep up with the others. southbound only: Regus Express Motel: Days Inn book Forecourt: BP , BP Connect , Wild Bean Café , AdBlue Containers Parking Prices First two hours free for all vehicles, after which cars must pay £20 and HGVs, caravans and coaches £23, or £25 to include a £10 food voucher. Prices are paid using PayByPhone - more details or in the shop or restaurant. The location code is 5252 (northbound) and 5253 (southbound). The fees are strictly enforced by CP Plus . Trivia and History Full details: History:Watford Gap Cramped but popular - the original restaurant. The traditional 'gateway to the north', Watford Gap probably manages to be both Britain's most famous and most infamous motorway service area. It has also managed to convince the world's press that it's the oldest. Going right back to the days of The Blue Boar, Watford Gap has seen highs and lows that have all shaped Britain's motoring culture.

Recent History Watford Gap was where Roadchef tried WHSmith . It was a success and has since been rolled out at all their services. In 2010, a large redevelopment of the northbound services saw a new entrance created, and the restaurant reduced from a large RestBite servery to a smaller Hot Food Co. counter. In 2012, this was changed to RoadCcef's trial restaurant Fresh Food Café . A Carvery Express outlet opened here on the northbound side in September 2015, a first for a Roadchef service area. Survey Results Use with care. Outdated surveys have been included for interest only. In May 2012, Visit England rated the northbound services as 3 stars, southbound as 2 stars. In August 2011, Visit England rated the services as 3 stars. In 2006, Holiday Which? rated the services at 3/5. In 1977 Egon Ronay rated the services as poor. He said it was clean and appreciated the hanging baskets, but described some of the food as "nasty".

Alternatives M1 motorway and Watford Gap service station celebrate 50 years | Daily Mail Online comments Britain's most famous road and one of the country's best known service stations are celebrating a big birthday. Both the M1 and Watford Gap are marking 50 years of iconic road travel by acknowledging their more famous users and offering 1959 prices. The latter is even staging a play paying homage to the many travelling musicians from The Beatles and Dusty Springfield to The Rolling Stones, who have used it as a roadside watering hole. Taking the high road: There were just five million licensed cars on the road in 1959 when the M1 opened Previously called the Blue Boar, the services became so talked about among stars that Jimi Hendrix mistook it for a London nightclub. Beyond its celebrity fans, the arrival of the M1 also ushered in a new age of high-speed road travel. It had no speed limit and with just five million registered cars in the UK there was certainly no traffic. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Steven Dukes, from the Society for All British and Irish Road Enthusiasts, said: 'Before the M1 there was no real idea of long distance travel.

It opened up a way of living we couldn't really have anticipated.' Famous faces: Keith Richards is pictured in the 1960s at Watford Gap Services Now, with 28 million licensed cars in the UK, the stretches of the motorway with the biggest queues are junction 19 north of Rugby in the West Midlands and junction 32 east of Sheffield. Roads minister Chris Mole described the M1 as a 'motorway with an iconic past'. 'It's a road that's certainly grown in use. People know it and love it, and probably hate it as well,' he added. 50 years on: The M1 is rather busier these days than it was when it opened in 1959 The history of the 193-mile long motorway has also been shaped by some dramatic incidents. In January 1989, a Boeing 737 flown by British Midland Airways crashed on an embankment on the M1 at Kegworth in Leicestershire close to East Midlands airport. A total of 47 passengers were killed but many walked away unhurt and no vehicles on the motorway were hit.

In 1997, sections of the M1 were closed as the funeral procession of Diana, Princess of Wales, travelled from London to Althorp in Northamptonshire with mourners lining the route. Sign of the times: A new signpost at Watford Gap services marks the perceived north-south boundary However, the section of the artery that stretches from London to Leeds and its first service station are probably best known for the ongoing rivalry between England's north and south. Watford Gap is often referred to as the unofficial boundary and today has unveiled a new sign with arrows pointing each way. The services company is even lobbying the Oxford English Dictionary to be included as an expression of the divide. There Are Places I Remember: Songs About Places: Watford Gap 01/07/2010 Watford Gap Despite its ubiquitous role in the British way of life for the past 50 years, there have been far fewer songs –and certainly less heroic ones - about the British motorway system than its American equivalent, with its Route 66 and Promised Land.

There’s Tom Robinson’s 2,4,6, 8 Motorway, Chris Rea’s Road to Hell (inspired by the M25), and, of course, John Shuttleworth’s The Man who Lives on the M62. There have been even fewer about motorway service stations, despite most people having visited one in their lifetime. In fact, I can only think of one, Roy Harper’s, Watford Gap, first released in 1977 as part of his Bullinamingvase album and fairly quickly withdrawn. For some reason, the Blue Boar company that owned the service station at that time objected to the jaunty chorus of ‘Watford Gap, Watford Gap, plate of grease and a load of crap’ and the references to a solid concrete-burger and plastic cups of used bathwater.Ironically, Harper’s perhaps two best-known songs, One of those Days in England and When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease, painted a very different picture of England, going back to childhood memories and beyond for an elegiac portrayal of a sunlit rural past.

A long way away from burgers and chips off the M1 In many ways, 1977 seems late for this song: its descriptions could have come from five years or more earlier. Roy Harper had been on the English folk and rock scene since the mid-sixties without really breaking through to the major league and would have been well acquainted with Watford Gap and its significance to the music groups that nightly stopped off for an English breakfast at 2am. In this, the song describes a little slice of cultural history. The first English motorway, the M1, opened in 1959 and Watford Gap was its first service station, 70 miles or so north of London and en route for Birmingham and all points north. As such it was in a prime position for groups to stop off whilst travelling to and from gigs. A possibly apocryphal story is that Jimi Hendrix heard so many musicians referring to the Blue Boar (the name often used to refer to the service station) that he thought it was a night club.

Actually, it is now difficult to imagine the impact that places like Watford Gap had in their first few years, viewed with delight by many as an exciting culinary event and possibly the first cafe they had been to..Even the Blue Boar started off with waitress service but had dispensed with all the fancy stuff by the mid-sixties. By the time of Roy Harper’s song, the ‘fine dining experience’ promised at its opening was but a distant memory. The song can be seen as more than a throw-away diatribe against bad food and is interesting in two other ways. Its mocking delivery in country and western style illustrates again that songs about the road and travel in England are going to end up as a joke when set against the American genre. Billy Bragg did his best with A13 Trunk Road to the Sea (‘It starts down in Wapping, There aint no stopping..’) but it is hard to imagine a British 24 hours from Tulsa or By the Time I get to Phoenix. Maybe it is to do with the relative scale of distances but it is difficult to make a car/coach/train journey across Britain sound glamorous.

The ‘We boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh’ of Paul Simon’s America would become ‘We boarded a National Express in Milton Keynes’ The other is the little slice of history it offers, not just in the picture of motorway fare and the meeting point of the Blue Boar at a particular point in time, but in the lyrics themselves. Unlike much of Roy Harper’s work, the song was very much of its time. The references to football hooligans sticking the boot in and to Chopper Ronnie (Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris of Chelsea); the casual sexism of some of the lyrics; Spaghetti Junction: all say Seventies Britain. Like Sunny Goodge Street, it creates a little time bubble. Alain de Botton has likened using such service stations to ‘like listening to a very sad Leonard Cohen song. In a way it is grim, but it is also redemptive’. One’s view of them may change according to one’s stage in life. As a child, they can be exciting places to stop as you journey to the seaside.; as a parent a place to enable kids to let off steam in the play areas while you clean up the back seats.: as a commuter, a place to escape for a few moments.

For musicians of the 1960’s and 1970’s places like the Blue Boar were a meeting ground to swap stories and information in an age before mobiles, the internet and social networking. Somewhere in the ether the Blue Boar still exists. The transit vans and motor bikes are in the car-park, the plates of congealed sausage, beans and chips are on the chipped formica tables with the plastic knives and forks, the fags are stubbed out in the saucers, the tea is stewing in the cups, the pinball machine is racking up the scores and Roy Harper or Stan Webb of Chicken Shack are slumped in a seat. Britain’s own Route 66. Motorway Service Stations: Who, Exactly, Are They Servicing? | The Huffington Post Motorway Service Stations: Who, Exactly, Are They Servicing? 27/01/2012 21:58 | Updated 27 March 2012 Mike Peake Freelance journalist specialising in whatever he's been asked to write about that week They used to be somewhere to change the oil, have a quick wee and perhaps stock up on a bent sandwich.

If you were in the mood, you could grab a gift for someone you didn't care for (Jim Reeves boxed-set, anyone?), you could waste a pound on a fruit machine, and if hunger had rendered you so weak you could no longer think properly, you could pick up a tray (strength permitting) and ask a lady who had never seen sunlight to prise a two-day-old lump of cod off a stainless steel hotplate. Then you gunned the Rover in the direction of the slip road and rejoined the M6. A recent survey has revealed that we Brits are "falling out of love with" motorway service stations, and that a third of us actively avoid them altogether. I'm more amazed that anyone still uses these roadside horrors at all. Extensive research (Wikipedia) reveals that the first British service station was opened at Watford Gap in 1959, and when it did, people quickly got a handle on exactly where they stood. This wasn't a place to linger - it was somewhere you stopped only when every other choice had been exhausted. If the car was on fire or if you'd gone more than 24 hours straight without liquid, then yes, you could reasonably be expected to 'pull in'.

But you mentally allowed yourself no more than five minutes' stopping time. Dads everywhere knew that the longer they stayed, the closer they got to bankruptcy - and that's why you couldn't go more than a mile on a motorway in the 1970s without seeing a cheery family piddling roadside, half-buried in gorse bushes. More enterprising fathers would even knock up some sort of contraption for the purposes of doing it in the car. Notoriously expensive since day one, service stations have steadily become an ever-bigger drain on the motorist's wallet. This isn't some political rant about the price of fuel: I'm talking about the appearance of upmarket coffee shops. Of Marks and Spencer. Of signs advertising which High Street chain will be trying to fleece you of your hard-earned money 24, 56 and then 88 miles down the road. Back when service stations were grotty, smelled strange, and were staffed by people who probably couldn't afford their own vehicles and had to live on site like oil rig workers (I'm guessing), there was no reason, ever, to cross that foreboding-looking bridge to see what was on the other side.

Today, though - why not? Let's all traipse across! There might be somewhere to pick up Stallone's new blu-ray over there. You can pass hours at a service station. They are but a whisker from becoming destinations in their own right, (oh God), and some of them even have hotels. So far, there's no Mandarin Oriental at Norton Canes, but it could only be a matter of time. These "airports of the road" are variously home to KFC, WH Smith, Thorntons, Fone Bitz, Waitrose, McDonald's, Armani (maybe) and on and on and on. Why? Who needs all of this on a car journey? Where is it going to end? My prediction is that the next Westfield Shopping Centre will not be built on prime retail space at the edge of Liverpool or Leeds, but off a slip road on the M11. There'll be 10-pin bowling, a Heston Blumenthal cookery school, five cinemas and parking for 100,000 cars.

It will be a triumph of consumerism over common sense, and in a nod towards tradition they'll still place a bank of winking fruit machines near the exit door in case you fancy a cheeky spin on the way out. There will be a Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum housing an actual-size replica of the original Watford Gap services, and you'll quickly forget why you were even on the motorway in the first place. Leaving £500 poorer but with an armful of branded carrier bags, you'll step into your car, cross the new eight-lane road bridge to the other side and rejoin the motorway - now facing the direction you originally came from. Knackered, you can't really be bothered with a visit now. Sorry nan - maybe next time. At least we managed to pick you up a nice Jim Reeves boxed-set for next Christmas.

Follow Mike Peake on Twitter: More: Watford Gap Services M1 | History and Trivia Watford Gap Services M1 Other ratings from visitors to the site Truckers Opened: 1959 Owners: Blue Boar, RoadChef Opened on the same day as the M1 itself, Watford Gap is the first and oldest MSA in the UK. The petrol station in the early days Despite the name, Watford Gap is nowhere near Watford, or at least the Watford in Hertfordshire that most people think of when they hear the name. The name of the MSA comes from the nearby village of Watford, Northamptonshire, while Watford Gap itself is a long-standing name for the gap in the surrounding hills through which not only the M1, but also the A5, the West Coast Main Line railway and the Grand Union canal all pass. So within a a few hundred yards, four different eras of long-distance transport construction are represented. As well as being the first, Watford Gap is also a slight anomaly in the history of British MSAs in more ways than one.

The majority of other MSAs built along with the new motorways were owned by large, national catering and hotel chains, such as Forte, who built the second-oldest MSA, Newport Pagnell (just down the road from Watford Gap) and Granada, one of their main early rivals. Watford Gap, though, was offered to a local firm who had previously run a filling station at a roundabout on the A5, not far from the location of the new MSA. The company was named Blue Boar, after a pub at the same roundabout. Blue Boar’s existing business was likely to be severely affected by the opening of the M1, so as compensation they were offered the opportunity to run one of the two service areas to be constructed on the new motorway. Originally, it was planned that Watford Gap would only serve trucks, while Newport Pagnell would serve cars. But, since Newport Pagnell wasn’t ready for the opening of the M1, Watford Gap found itself having to serve all traffic, and by the time Newport Pagnell was ready the idea of a split had been abandoned.

The cafe in the early days A side effect of this was that Watford Gap never had much money spent on it. Down the road, Forte spent large amounts on the design and architecture of Newport Pagnell, partly as a statement of intent and partly because in those days, operators weren’t allowed to have their name on the signs so the only way they could advertise themselves was to have a distinctive building which was visible from the motorway itself (something which later made Forton into an MSA icon). But, since Blue Boar didn’t have the money for that sort of thing, and they were only expecting to be serving truckers anyway, their design specifications consisted of what was essentially two canteens, one either side of the motorway. Even so, it wasn't actually ready for opening day so, for the first few weeks, travellers were served from temporary facilities inside a farmyard barn! Keith Richards at Watford Gap Despite its humble beginnings, Watford Gap’s location made it the more popular of the early M1 sites. And it wasn’t just truckers, commercial travellers and holidaymakers who used it.

By the end of the 60s, Watford Gap had acquired a reputation for playing host to the top bands and musicians of the day. Gerry Marsden, of Gerry and the Pacemakers, is widely quoted as saying that it was “an oasis in the desert of roads” for travelling musicians on their way back to London after gigs in the Midlands or North, while Jimi Hendrix is reputed to have been under the false impression that the “Blue Boar Cafe” was some trendy nightclub, because his British contemporaries mentioned it so often. By the late 70s, though, the romance of motorways had started to wear off and the travelling public were beginning to vent their frustration with poor quality and overpriced food at MSAs, a feeling summed up by Roy Harper through the song, “Watford Gap”, in which he bemoaned the “death defying meals” served up by “the lonesome traveller’s rotgut or bacteria’s revenge”. Unfortunately for Roy at the time, a board member of his record company was also a director of Blue Boar, so the song was removed from later pressings of the album. Recent CD re-releases have it restored to the running order.

Blue Boar finally sold Watford Gap to RoadChef in 1999, and since then the buildngs have been completely reconstructed with only the basic layout remaining from the early days. As part of Watford Gap's 50th Anniversary celebrations in 2009, BBC Radio Northampton created "Watford Gap: The Musical". You can watch it right here on MotorwayServices.Info, courtesy of YouTube: Watford Gap Services M1 is a 2 burger rated service area. × Motorway madness | Global | The Guardian browse all sections close Motorway madness When the M1 opened 40 years ago, it was to bring with it a new kind of car culture - a culture of speed and speed limits, service stations and the idea that north and south meet at Watford Gap. Jonathan Glancey tells how Britain accelerated down this stretch of road into a new era Monday 18 October 1999 19.41 EDT Share on Messenger Close The computer on the Jag's dashboard tells me that I've averaged 15.6mph from my home in the City of London to the start of the M1 at Hendon. Not bad for The Smoke.

Now it's time to ease the loud pedal to the floor, to surge up to 4,000 rpm and a steady two-mile-a-minute cruise up past Newport Pagnell and the Watford Gap, beneath fast disappearing white-on-blue signs bearing that daunting legend "The North". Dream on. This is 1999 and speeds on the M1, Britain's first long-haul motorway, have fallen drastically since the day, 40 years ago on November 2, that minster of transport Ernest Marples gave the green light and thousands of sports cars and old bangers entered the motorway age. On that day, of the 13,000 cars that dripped oil over the virgin concrete carriageways marking the first 72-mile stretch of the M1 from Watford to Rugby, more than 100 broke down. One even managed to shed its engine. These were the days before the MOT test when ancient black cars incapable of cruising at more than 40 were as much a part of the British way of life as pipes, trilbys, class distinction and driving gloves.

A tiny stretch of what passed for motorway, the Preston bypass - all 8.75 miles of it - had been opened the year before by the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, but it was small beer compared to the great roads already in use in other parts of the world. Though Westminster had debated the idea of motorways as long ago as 1906, nothing came of it for half a century, and the first motorway as we know it opened on Long Island, New York, in 1914. Mussolini, a man given to running on Rome, had built 1,875 miles of fast "autostrada" in Italy by the time Hitler came to power in Germany. By the time of the Fuhrer's "lightning war" against Poland, the Todt Organisation (which went on to construct Rommel's Normandy coastal defences) had realised 2,000 miles of sweeping German "Autobahnen". Back to today. I ease the Jag up the tight, bumpy ramp on to the M1, and straight away encounter roadworks signs, monstrous regiments of Day-Glo traffic cones and signs barking "No emergency phones".

The inner carriageway is grooved and rutted by the heavy wheels and groaning axles of 40-tonne artics. Average speed to my first stop, Toddington services, is 40.7mph. Though Britain was late into the motorway age, the men from the ministry pulled their fingers out when the M1 London to Leeds motorway was finally approved in 1956. Progress was as speedy as a Bentley Continental. A mile of concrete roadway was completed every eight days, a concrete bridge (to the design of the M1's chief engineer, Sir Owen Williams of Wembley Stadium fame) every three. The M1 was completed on time and more or less on budget at a cost of £28.5m.

Two days before the official opening, Stirling Moss, the grand prix and Mille Miglia legend, led a va-va-vroooooom parade up and down the new road as some of the 5,000 £17- and £19-a-week workers (basic 55 hours plus overtime), who had cleared 20m tonnes of earth and stone over the past 584 days stood on the side and cheered in their £2 15s 9d donkey jackets. Ernest Marples was said to be appalled at the speed and noise. The M1 was open, that was the main thing, although it didn't reach Leeds for another nine years.

In the meantime, the new road introduced the nation to the MOT test (old cars just couldn't hack the M1), "motorway madness", pile-ups, "contra-flows", weekend cottages, "juggernauts", long-distance freight shifted off steam-age railways, police "radar" patrols (undertaken in a fleet of brand new white Ford Zephyr Mk2s supplemented by less agile Austin Westminsters), "breathalysers", the 70mph speed limit, compulsory seat belts and what was to become as big a joke as the British Rail sandwich: the motorway service station. Our culture, on and off the road, would never be quite the same again. The first motorway service stations were at Newport Pagnell (home of Aston-Martin), Dunchurch and the Watford Gap, which is where, for southerners, "The North" indicated on Jock Kinnear's white-on-blue signs starts.

In 1959, Charles Forte employed smiling hostesses to take hats and overcoats from M1 pioneers who could then sit on colourful bar-stools and eat hot dogs (2s or 10p) or, if you were a part of the gin'n'Jag set, "large fillet steaks" for 12s 6d (72p). Alcohol was not served, although many slipped off the M1 for a snifter or three after a 140mph burn in a Mercedes 300SL or, from 1961, in that legend of the pre-speed limit M1, an E-Type Jaguar. Police were tough on crime, then, oh yes. Within six weeks of the M1's opening, a woman was fined £50 for reckless driving, rolling her Merc casually across the oncoming carriageway at 125mph. Bad luck, ma'am! At least she didn't lose her licence. Ripping days. Yet within three years, the M1 needed major repairs.

Questions were asked in the House and a sign reading "Marples Must Go!" was emblazoned across one of Sir Owen William's concrete bridges (since listed by English Heritage). It was still there years after Marples had been forgotten. Police chiefs, meanwhile were concerned about speed and snarl-ups. It was to be some years yet before jams could stretch almost half the length of the original M1 as they did from the mid-80s, but speeding on the M1 was certainly something to be taken seriously. In 1964 Superintendent ES Turton of Bedfordshire police denied turning a blind eye to the fact that AC was testing its Le Mans entry seven-litre Cobra at speeds of up to 180mph. On my run up the M1 to the Watford Gap and Junction 18 (the northernmost reach of the first section), I find it hard to maintain 70mph, such is the volume of traffic. The motorway was designed to cope comfortably with a flow of 13-14,000 cars a day. By 1965, this had reached an average of 30,000.

The figure for 1998 from the ministry of transport is 88,000, with peaks in excess of 130,000. It was speed that mesmerised most people in the early days. At Watford Gap service station (see-through pot of Tetleys and a mid-morning, near-frozen BLT), I meet Sydney Nolan, who has toured all of Britain's motorways in cars as diverse as a Simca Aronde, Opel Kapitan, Ford Corsair 2000 and, in recent years, a Toyota something-or-the-other. He shows me tables of comparative figures taken from a Road Research Laboratory report produced for the department of scientific and industrial research in the early 60s. Did you know that on test, a "typical six-cylinder model" (I imagine a 125mph 3.8-litre Jag Mk2) ran the 130 miles up and down from Park Street, St Albans to Dunchurch near Rugby at the end of the first section of the M1, at an average speed of 60.8mph.

"The same journey," says Nolan, with a glint in his eye, "took 216 minutes via the parallel A5 and A45, which is an average of 34.3mph." What about fuel consumption? "Well, granted, that would have been much higher on the M1, but I don't think anyone worried overmuch about that in the days before the Oil Crisis [1973-4]". Did the M1 offer any real benefit in the long run? It's hard to say. In 1965, British Rail launched its new electric express service from London Euston to Crewe (change for the far North and Scotland) and Lancashire. The railway runs for long stretches alongside the motorway. From their BR Design Panel-approved blue-check seats in the comfort and safety of "The Red Rose" or "The Royal Scot", Inter-City passengers watched M1 traffic fall behind their ton-up train. Not only were the new trains fast, but a 70mph speed limit had been imposed on the motorways and traffic was getting heavier. By then, the motorway had lost much of its early glamour.

It seems strange to us now, perhaps, that villagers from along those first 72 miles came to watch the construction of the M1 and marvel at its earth-moving progress. "We used to take picnics to see the last few miles completed," says Deirdre Mason, who lived near Crick at the time. The alternator of her spotless 1978 Morris Marina 1300 had packed up and she was waiting at the Dunchurch services for the emergency services to arrive when I parked alongside her. "I don't know what we were thinking, really. I suppose we all believed in progress then. You can't stop, we used to say. I can't recall anyone protesting about the loss of trees and countryside." By the time of the "Marples Must Go!" slogan, the M1 had lost its innocence. As early as October 1961, two 10-year-old girls were told off in no uncertain terms for a "prank" that involved dropping stones on passing cars from Chalton bridge, near Luton. And farmers began to moan after their curiously complicit behaviour in the heyday of the M1's construction.

In 1965, Donald Reynolds, a dairy farmer, lodged a protest with the ministry of transport when it refused to dig a tunnel or build a bridge for him when the motorway scythed right through the middle of his 200 acres. "I didn't really mind them cutting my farm in half for the sake of an essential road, but it is wrong that they should not even provide me with access to my only grazing land on the other side of the motorway." The days of environmental concern would soon enough see motorway protestors battling for the rights of cows, trees and tranquillity. "It's a strange one," says a press spokesman from the RSPB. "You could argue, from one perspective that the M1 has been good and bad for wildlife. Buzzards in particular find plenty of small mammals to eat on the motorway's embankments; you'll often see them hovering overhead. They're canny birds and rarely make the mistake of diving for carrion on the carriageways. The greatest cause of deaths of barn owls in the M1 corridor is traffic.

Yet, in a way, owls thrive here; they have to get by with life along the M1, because farmers have razed the long grasses that once surrounded fields and provided rich pickings for birds. For songbirds, though, the story isn't so good. Birds living near the motorway probably can't hear each other sing and as singing is a vital part of their courtship, nesting and survival, they may well be losing ground." The song of the M1 itself is a ceasless roar. House prices in the villages glimpsed alongside carriageways are possibly good buys if you can bear the noise. "You get accustomed to it", says a busy farmer turning a Lamborghini tractor in his yard near Kilsby. And the truth was I couldn't hear the nearby M1 over the din of agricultural machinery. Nor see it through the density of trees separating farm from concrete carriageways. Perhaps all to many of us have grown a little deaf and blind to the impact of motorways. I take the old A5 back down to London rather than chance a snarl-up on the middle-aged M1. There is virtually no traffic, but a medley of songbirds when I stop for petrol.

My average speed is 41.8mph. Serviceable | The Economist Motorway service stations, long a national embarrassment, are finally improving Jan 5th 2013 Tweet WITH its undulating roof and glass walls, Britain’s newest motorway service station resembles nothing quite so much as an airport departure lounge. Cobham, on the M25 south-west of London, has a food court with offerings ranging from McDonald’s and Starbucks to Papa John’s Pizza and El Mexicana. It also has a lakeside terrace and a business lounge—one of three now operated by Regus on the country’s motorways. Apart from a cluster of fruit machines, there is scarcely a reminder of the grimy, boxy services so familiar to, and disliked by, British drivers. Motorway service stations were once rather glamorous. Britain’s first opened at Watford Gap in November 1959, on the same day as the M1. The nation thrilled to the opportunities offered by its burgeoning motorway network and the facilities at its side. Crowds gathered for the opening of the services at Newport Pagnell in 1960.

Forton services built an excitingly modern restaurant (pictured) from which diners could admire the Lancashire countryside and the passing traffic. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones stopped off at service stations after gigs. Youngsters would hang out in them because they were some of the few places open 24 hours a day. In this section Reprints Within a decade, though, the novelty had worn off. “Britons had fallen out of love with motorways by 1970,” says Joe Moran, a cultural historian. They had become congested, speed-restricted affairs, with service stations to match. The food, generally served from a central cafeteria, was a national, even front-page, joke. Football hooligans, keen to find somewhere to fight away from police eyes, would occasionally used the car parks and footbridges as battlegrounds. Mr Moran reports that one service station, on the M62, was removing the equivalent of 50 miles of graffiti every year. Liberalise and they will come Then came John Major. The prime minister sandwiched between Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair struggled with a rebellious party and a small majority, but he was a doughty campaigner for slight improvements in many aspects of British life.

In 1992 he told the Conservative Party conference that service stations must be reformed. Until that year the government had owned, developed and leased out all such facilities. This bureaucratic approach was not delivering services where they were needed. “Every parent knows what I mean”, complained Mr Major (now Sir John). “Next services, 54 miles—when your children can’t make ten!” The government duly sold off around half of its freeholds—it still retains 37—and gave the private sector the job of identifying and buying appropriate land and applying for planning permission from local authorities. The longed-for transformation of roadside facilities is taking place frustratingly slowly. Planning permission often proves hard to secure, even on sites beside ugly six-lane highways. Extra spent 19 years getting Cobham services from conception to completion. Unfortunately, competitive forces remain leashed. Thanks to government recommendations, a service station’s nearest competitor could well be 30 miles away. High barriers to entry mean that four large-operators—Extra, Moto, Roadchef and Welcome Break—run more than 90% of services. England has just one locally-owned operation, at Tebay in Cumbria.

This is run by the family on whose farmland the service station was built; the farm now provides beef and lamb for the Tebay shops. Coincidentally or not, the southbound facility is the only one in the country rated five stars by VisitEngland, the national tourist board. Service stations must abide by regulations that, among other things, require them to provide two hours of free parking and stay open every hour of the year. This keeps running costs high, as does the fact that around a third of customers just use the loos, which also have to be free, and spend no money. The Highways Agency forbids services to promote themselves as destinations in their own right, as this would bring extra traffic onto the motorways. They can entice customers by cleaning more regularly and bringing in a Wild Bean Café, but they cannot build cinemas or bowling alleys. Liberalisation may not have produced many new facilities, but it has pushed forward the outsourcing of food provision. The arrival of high-street food brands in service stations both old and new has wrought improvements, says Paul Watters of the Automobile Association. Service stations have adapted to changes in British eating habits. “In the early days people wanted to sit and eat,” says Andrew Leatham of Moto.

“Now they’re moving to grab-and-go.” That is a business the high-street brands know well. Britons today see little glamour in their service-station experience. They queue for Egg McMuffins and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, rather than for seats in, say, the Captain’s Table, a Terence Conran-designed restaurant that once spanned the M1 motorway at Leicester Forest East. But at least the dishevelled facilities of more recent memory are shaping up in the face of sprucer rivals. For modern drivers keen just to get on with their journeys, that is usually enough. Correction: Our understanding of the facilities available to American drivers was that they included rest areas and truck stops, but nothing that equated to the British-style service station. The original version of this article included a line to that effect. Yet as several commenters have pointed out, we were wrong. The article was amended on January 8th 2013.

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Watford Gap - The Musical was filmed by 80 amateurs with links to the station, in Northants, where Roads Minister Chris Mole is unveiling a plaque. Half a century ago, Transport Minister Ernest Marples opened a 62-mile section between what are now junctions 5 and 18, from Hertfordshire to the Midlands. It was built for 14,000 vehicles a day. Ten times that number use the M1 today. The first section of motorway to be constructed in the UK was the Preston bypass - now part of the M6 in Lancashire. However, the M1 was the first designed to transport people long distances across the nation, by eventually linking London to Yorkshire.

M1 CONSTRUCTION FACTS One of first motorways to be opened in the UK, in 1959 193 miles (311 km) in length Major north-south route 20 million tonnes of earth and rock excavated to build road 5,000 road builders brought to work on double-decker buses Workers' canteens needed every 2.5 miles Construction cost in 1959, £50m Watford Gap: The Musical It opened without speed limits, crash barriers, a central reservation or lighting, at a time when there were fewer than five million licensed cars on UK roads compared with more than 28 million now. The musical was created by BBC Radio Northamptonshire and features a number of people who have worked, visited and dined at the rest-break location. Previously called the Blue Boar, people originally made special trips to visit its restaurant and dozens of stars including Dusty Springfield, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are known to have stopped there. Mr Mole described the M1 as a "motorway with an iconic past". "It's a road that's certainly grown in use. People know it and love it, and probably hate it as well," he added.

The road now stretches 193 miles from Brent Cross in north-west London to Garforth near Leeds. Steven Jukes, from the Society for All British and Irish Road Enthusiasts, said: "Before the M1 there was no real idea of long distance travel. It opened up a way of living we couldn't really have anticipated." Over the years, Watford Gap services has become an unofficial demarcation point for the perceived north-south divide and a signpost was unveiled on Sunday at the "boundary". Bookmark with:

Question: The Watford Gap service station is on which British motorway?
Answer: M1