Watford Gap services: inside an unlikely motoring landmark

Jimi Hendrix thought it was a nightclub, in their early days The Beatles regularly dropped in on their way south from Liverpool and Gerry Marsden of the Pacemakers rated it as a good place for a “quick stop and a quick nosh”.

Welcome to Watford Gap services, located on both sides of the M1, the southbound site being the first motorway services to open in the UK, back in 1959.

With its colourful history as a rest stop for major bands in the 1960s before service stations became more common, Watford Gap has acquired the status of cultural icon. (One waitress sold her book of autographs for £1000.)

But if you want to experience its vibe one last time, you’d better be quick because Roadchef, the company that owns it, plans to knock it down and replace it with something more in tune with the 21st century, albeit with a display celebrating its glorious past.

“Watford Gap services is the jewel in Roadchef’s crown,” explains Amanda Mason, head of marketing at the company. “Customers have a strong emotional attachment to it and there are still people living nearby who, as teenagers, would drop in to see which stars were returning from gigs late at night.

But as the gateway to the north and south, both sites need to evolve. People’s reasons for wanting to visit – to rest, to eat and to refuel or recharge – will remain the same but we need to secure the business for the future and make sure Watford Gap is sustainable.”

Today, the contrast between the main building on the southbound carriageway, which looks almost as it did 65 years ago, and the rank of 12 smart new 350kW high-speed Gridserve chargers serving the latest electric cars adds weight to Mason’s argument. 

There’s no redevelopment date yet but Roadchef’s plans are well advanced. To help ensure the new facility is, as its predecessor was, a trend-setter, last year Roadchef organised a competition among students in the Innovation department at Bristol University, inviting them to ‘blue-sky’ ideas for the new site, exploring themes around people, the future and the environment.

Mason was encouraged by the results. “The competition has changed the way we think about what the next generation wants from a service station,” she says. “The way younger people think about driving and travel is very different from people even just a decade or so older than them.”

I’m a few decades older still so forgive me if I don’t wholly share her excitement. A circus and a funfair for the kids? Virtual reality headsets that allow visitors to view the traditional one-arm bandit area at a Las Vegas casino or even the Grand National? I’m not sure about those student ideas, especially when Mason tells me the 52 million customers who visit Roadchef’s 30 service stations each year linger for less than 20 minutes.

However, another idea, using virtual reality to imagine you’re in a Michelin-starred restaurant and then order your gourmet meal from a ‘dark kitchen’ on site that prepares and delivers food but does not serve it does sound interesting.

At the very least, it would put folk singer Roy Harper’s lines about his culinary experiences of Watford Gap to rest: “Watford Gap, Watford Gap, a plate of grease and a load of crap.” Other promising ideas include creating a landscaped garden for visitors to walk in while earning points to be redeemed against sustainable food and drink options.

Although it’s hardly original, one student’s idea to harness solar energy to power the building gets a big tick in Roadchef’s box marked ‘reducing carbon footprint’.

Not so another’s to install turnstiles at the entrance to the new building that would generate electricity as people turned them. “We’re about being welcoming and turnstiles are not welcoming,” says Mason.

Away from the student competition, blue-sky thinking of a different sort is taking place elsewhere at Roadchef. As director of EV implementation, Paul Comer has the unenviable task of predicting demand for EV chargers across the group – and not only that but also securing sufficient energy for them.

“Power supply drives the whole conversation,” he says. “Given the rising demands on charger availability and speeds, getting enough power to service stations is going to be crucial in the years ahead, but how much are we going to need to future-proof them?

“At present, Watford Gap southbound has a dozen 350kW ultra-fast chargers consuming 2MW of power each day and northbound six consuming 1.25MW. Utilisation is around 30% but by 2025 we expect each site to require as much as 20MW.

One megawatt will power 1000 homes for one hour so that’s a lot of energy. We also need to plan for electric trucks. They’re likely to require 400kW chargers since no operator can afford to have a truck standing still and recharging for longer than is necessary. And that’s before we start talking about hydrogen…”

Despite the challenges of energy supply and the planning issues of infrastructure development, Roadchef aims to install ultra-fast chargers at each of its 30 locations. 

Last year it did so at nine sites and this year it plans to install more at a further 14. “We’re pushing as fast and as hard as we can,” says Comer. With ultra-fast chargers filling the car park and VR headset-wearing visitors tucking into moules marinières, Jimi Hendrix wouldn’t recognise the place.