For most of us, motorway service stations are non-places
where we have only brief, anonymous encounters with other human beings. But
people do meet there. They are a well-known no man's land for divorced couples
to exchange children, and for football transfer bungs to be handed over in
brown envelopes. You
can sit in a service station for hours
and, for all the attention you get from the table clearers and floor wipers,
you might as well be a ghost. That’s why low-level lawlessness has
always thrived in the anonymity of the cafes and car parks. Unwanted babies are
dumped here, illegal immigrants exchanged, drugs and contraband traded by
small-time criminals.
In the 1960s,
gigging musicians would bump into each other after midnight at the M1 service stations and exchange
gossip about venues and recording deals. The Beatles, according to one Newport
Pagnell counter-assistant, were ‘very unruly’ and threw bread rolls at their
manager, Brian Epstein. Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason, once recalled the
Blue Boar at Watford Gap at two o’clock
on a Sunday morning looking like a Ford Transit van rally as bands made
their way back from gigs, and ‘crushed velvet trousers outnumbered truckers’
overalls’. When Jimi Hendrix first
arrived in Britain ,
he heard the name ‘Blue Boar’ so often that he thought it was a new nightclub
and asked which band was playing there that night. Chris White of the Zombies
called it ‘the feeding trough of the mid-60’s Beat Boom’.
I'm doing a talk on roads as part of the Liverpool
Biennial on 7 November, and I have to relate them somehow to this year's theme
of 'hospitality'. Of course, most people think of roads as pretty inhospitable
places, but then most of them don't know about the role of Membury Services in
helping to create the Meg and Mog books.
Sad loss to children's writing, I love the Meg and Mog books and the wonderful simplicity of the bold illustrations.
ReplyDeletethanks for sharing
martine