Electric Eleven
Sunday. An early start, as planned. We set out around 5 a.m. from the Park Inn in Walsall, and stopped at Watford Gap services on the M1 for fuel and breakfast. Made good time despite the heavy rain, and got home just before nine. After that, a very quiet day by design, which included an afternoon nap. Roast chicken for supper, a quick wander in game with my guildies, and a relatively early night.
I discovered there’s quite a bit of local history and lore surrounding Watford Gap services, and decided it was worth looking into in more detail. So, here goes:
A short note about Watford Gap services
Watford Gap is not named after the large Hertfordshire town, but after the much smaller Northamptonshire village of Watford. The ‘gap’ is a low passage between two hills, a useful route through the landscape which has long attracted roads, the Grand Union Canal and the railway, followed in 1959 by the M1. Its position between the Midlands and the South helped turn ‘north of Watford Gap’ into shorthand for the supposed boundary between two Englands, although the precise location of that boundary tends to depend upon which side of it the speaker happens to live.
The services opened with the M1 on 2 November 1959 and are generally regarded as Britain’s oldest motorway service area. Their operator, Blue Boar, evolved from a filling station business Lyndon Smith established at Dunchurch in 1937. Having won the motorway concession only a few months before opening day, it began at Watford Gap with a wooden shed and a single petrol pump. The restaurant followed in 1960, offering tea, grilled meals, puddings and somewhere to sit at any hour, all of which seemed distinctly modern when long-distance motoring still involved frequent mechanical pauses.
Being open through the night gave the Blue Boar an unexpected second life. During the 1960s it became a meeting place for musicians travelling between London and performances farther north, with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Dusty Springfield and Jimi Hendrix among those known to have stopped there.
Chris White of the Zombies called it ‘the feeding trough of the beat boom’, while legend has it that Hendrix heard other musicians mention the Blue Boar so often that he assumed it was a fashionable London nightclub. In reality, it was fluorescent lighting, eggs and strong tea at two in the morning, which may have been more useful.
Folk musician Roy Harper gave the food a less affectionate review in his 1977 song ‘Watford Gap’, describing it as ‘a plate of grease and a load of crap’. The song appeared on his album Bullinamingvase, but was removed from later pressings, reportedly because a member of EMI’s board also sat on the board of Blue Boar. It is difficult to imagine a more thoroughly British collision of motorway catering, progressive folk-rock and corporate governance.
The later service buildings were designed by Harry Weedon, better known for his work on the streamlined Odeon cinemas, but years of alterations have concealed much of their original character. Roadchef has operated Watford Gap since the 1990s, and recent proposals have included replacing the ageing buildings, expanding electric-car charging and creating a new travel hub. The exact scheme remains unsettled, so for the moment the old place continues much as before: no longer the only reliable source of hot food on the M1, but still an oddly durable landmark in the geography of British travel.
