In October 2023, at Skelton Lake service station on the M1 south-east of Leeds, Janine Gray received some bad news. She was surrounded by journalists and leading lights from the transport industry: people from the AA, the RAC, motorway service area chief executives, officials from National Highways. The big dogs. And it was among these gathered dignitaries that Gray heard the news she had been hoping, for the previous 12 months, not to hear. For the second year running, Hartshead Moor East – one half of the motorway services near Leeds that she managed – had been officially declared the worst service station in Britain.
This poll, conducted annually by the consumer watchdog Transport Focus, always makes the news. It produces gags on Have I Got News For You, punning headlines in the papers, “and finally” segments on local TV channels. Now Gray and her staff would be subjected to another round of ridicule. Of all the country’s service stations, which have a sort of aura of shitness to them anyway, theirs was apparently the shittest. Again.
These findings could not be easily dismissed: the Transport Focus poll is not some tinpot online survey, but a shockingly vast and serious operation. Each year, over a period of about seven weeks, pollsters are dispatched to almost every one of the 120-odd motorway service stations in Great Britain (a handful choose not to participate). About 70 people undertake 700 shifts across the survey period, ensuring each service station is visited on at least five occasions. More than 30,000 members of the public are surveyed. In other words: to lose one Transport Focus Motorway Services User Survey may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.
Like airports and shopping malls, service stations are often described as “non-places”, a designation used by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to describe characterless spaces in modern life that are defined by the transience of people moving through them. The very term “service area” is itself about as unspecific as can be imagined – a non-name, you could say – as if the person inventing the concept thought up a placeholder name and forgot to come back to it.
But to the people who work there, each service station is far from a non-place. What is it like, not to pass through a service station but to stay there, year in and year out? How did it feel, for Janine Gray and her colleagues, the people who make Hartshead Moor East tick, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, to be told it is the worst services in the whole country – a country that has a strange preoccupation with deciding which services are good and bad – not once, but twice? To know they were staring down the barrel of a third humiliation if things didn’t change? What were they going to do about it? And more than all that: what do Britain’s service stations, and our need to quantify their goodness or otherwise, tell us about ourselves?
These were the questions that preoccupied me when I came across Hartshead Moor’s story. I did not know, when I set out to answer them in late 2023, that getting those answers would take me almost three years, and nearly cost me my life.
It was in March 2024 that I first made the journey to Hartshead Moor. On my way there, I investigated how things looked at the other end of the Transport Focus poll. Rugby services on the M6 opened in 2021, and ranked first in 2022 and 2023. On the day I visited, daffodils lined the approach to the station, which overlooks the rolling countryside of Warwickshire. A fountain tinkled at me as I entered through sliding doors into a bright, airy space, with seating booths clad in plausibly Scandinavian pale wood. Outside were picnic tables set back far enough that you could almost imagine you were in a national park, rather than a few hundred metres from a motorway. The bathroom facilities were huge and spotless. I left feeling calm, recharged and ready to get back on the open road.
I continued north for two hours and arrived at Hartshead Moor East. It made a different impression. No vistas, no daffodils – just a squat, grey-white building with Welcome Break branding plastered over the front entrance. An apologetic-looking sign announced that there was a KFC and a Waitrose here, but you’d have to go “over the bridge”, exposed to the elements, to the westbound site. Inside, it was cramped and paint was peeling. On the first floor, beneath a low ceiling, was a Starbucks, a Subway and a forlorn seating area. There was no Scandinavian wood.
Between the Burger King and the toilets I met Gray, the woman whose job as manager was to get this place back on track. Gray – mid-40s, long black hair, gossipy manner – is a rare person for whom motorway services constitute not an occasional necessity, but the core of a life. She has worked at Welcome Break, the UK’s second-largest operator of service stations after Moto, since 2011. She talks without explanation about EVs, SCOs, NPSs and UBMs. For Gray, it is impossible to go to another service station and just “enjoy it”. Where the rest of us are getting in and getting out, she can’t help but notice dirty corners, the particularities of the lighting, any room for improvement. “It’s a busman’s thing,” she said.
We sat at a table on what is known to staff as the upper deck, outside what is known to staff as the Starbucks unit. There were a handful of other customers. I would, on future visits, get talking to some of these patrons, but I felt curiously inhibited today. There is an almost sacred anonymity to the service station. It is a place to slip out of yourself. I tried to imagine a stranger with a recording device approaching me as I ate a KFC Zinger Meal alone at a plastic table, and felt sure that it would be a violating experience, to be caught in flagrante delicto of being no one. You can see me, here? Here, where I hardly exist?
Gray and I were talking five months after the 2023 Transport Focus poll results came out. She was disappointed, of course, but the bad showing hadn’t been a shock. Welcome Break had been refurbishing the toilets when the pollsters came, and customers were having to make do with the portable toilets outside. The previous year, Gray reckoned that Hartshead Moor’s last-place finish was mostly because those toilets had been outdated. And too green. (Photos of the facilities pre-refurb do indeed show luridly lime green paint on the walls, Brat summer avant la lettre.)
The importance of toilets cannot be overstated. It is the one place that almost every visitor visits. The toilets dictate the economics of the service station, Gray explained. You’re paying more for your coffee here than on the high street because that coffee is subsidising the majority of people – about 60%, said Gray – who are here only to use the toilets. That, at least, is the official line from operators. Plus, there’s the fact that service stations are expensive to build and maintain. More cynical observers might also note that at a service station, you are a captive audience. Once you’re through those automatic doors, Welcome Break and the like have you over a barrel, pricing-wise.
As Gray and I spoke, other staff members came to join us. Millie Thornton, 22, worked in the Starbucks inside the main building, Sarah Hunter, 35, managed the cleaning team and Wendy Clarke, 55, was the shift manager at Subway. They represented a tiny fraction of the total Hartshead Moor workforce. Nearly 200 people work there, across East and West. That’s what is required to keep this place open 24 hours a day, every day. Cleaners, staff for each outlet, managers for those staff, finance people, assistant finance people, people to staff the hotel, people to handle fuel deliveries. “It takes an army,” as Thornton put it.
But army isn’t quite the right metaphor. A more apt one – though one that, I admit, sounds painfully like Welcome Break PR – might be “family”. It was a word I heard from staff many times over, and it seemed to have some basis in fact. Sarah, who manages the cleaning team, has worked at Hartshead Moor East since she was 16, when she took Saturday shifts while studying at college. She was still here in 2024, 18 years later. That year, one of her colleagues retired after 30 years of service. It’s steady work, with opportunity for progression, and it’s common to find a couple of generations of a family working at the same services. Thornton worked in the Starbucks on the upper deck, and her older sister worked in the Starbucks drive-thru.
When I brought up the poll, I was met with groans, eye rolls, shifting in seats. “The first time, fair enough. Like, take it on the chin,” Thornton said. “But the second one was a bit of a kick in the stomach. We were in the middle of a refurb. It’s not exactly ideal, but it was like: ‘Oh God, everyone’s been trying so hard for the past year.’” Gray told me she had driven home from the Transport Focus presentation at Skelton Lake in October 2023 with her head held high. “I’m not hiding,” she said, sounding like a football manager after a bruising defeat.
On that first visit, back in March 2024, I asked them what they were hoping for when Transport Focus returned in a few months. Gray said it would be business as usual. “We don’t put any airs and graces on,” she said with noble forbearance. “It is what it is, isn’t it?” Thornton was less phlegmatic. “It should surely improve, like come on!” she said, hands in the air in exasperation. In the months between the 2023 poll result and my visit, they had completed the toilet refurbishment, and had the WH Smith refreshed and a new unit put in, which operates as The Good Breakfast in the morning and Chopstix in the afternoon. “There’s nowt else we can do, apart from knock it down and start again.”
In the months that followed, it became clear that Transport Focus approached their Motorway Services User Survey with the seriousness of a pre-Trump US intelligence agency. I have come to realise that the company name is meant literally: when they say they’re focused on transport, they’re not screwing around. Service station managers are not informed when the Transport Focus pollsters are coming, to prevent them from influencing the results by, say, putting their best staff on shift. Transport Focus even do spot checks to verify that the surveying is being done properly. “It’s a huge operation,” said Louise Collins, Transport Focus’s director. So seriously does Transport Focus take this endeavour that I could not persuade them, even with the promise of signing an NDA, to tell me when the pollsters would be visiting Hartshead Moor East in 2024. My requests to speak to pollsters who had previously worked on the survey were swiftly knocked back. I would not be allowed to interfere in any way with the rigour of the process.
Unable to size up the pollsters myself, I turned to Gray and her colleagues. Mostly, they were pleasant, Gray said, but not always. She remembered feeling that one of them was going into her conversations with visitors with a negative bias against the services. “She was just like [here Gray pulled a sneering face]: ‘It’s not as good as Wetherby, is it? Have you been to Wetherby?’ And I just thought, hang on a minute.”
Gray and her colleagues had wondered whether the station itself was holding them back. Hartshead Moor opened in 1973, and the main buildings have remained largely unchanged. I told them about my visit to Rugby, and there were weary nods. That one was nice, they agreed. “But that’s a new one,” Gray pointed out.
Service stations arrived in the UK in 1959, with designs borrowed from Italy and the US, countries where motorways had a longer history. At first, service stations were government-owned but operated by private companies, and they were glamorous destinations. When Leicester Forest East M1 services opened in 1966, it housed a restaurant modelled on an ocean liner designed by Terence Conran, complete with a baby grand piano and waiters in sailor suits…
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