Food Heaven Is a British Motorway Service Station
All photographs by Martin Declan Kelly

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Food

Food Heaven Is a British Motorway Service Station

British motorway service stations are more than just toilets serving oil-slicked fry ups and fish and chips—they are our collective cultural convenience, a marble run of parallel and un-touching lives.

The British service station is more than just a toilet with chips. From the grey-faced gamblers to the harried, snack-stuffing parents, to the wire-haired terriers carrying McDonald's balloons through a car park, they are the whole of life. They are our collective cultural convenience. They are our worst intentions and the best that we deserve, a marble run of parallel and un-touching lives.

If I were banished to a desert island with just one book, it would be the guestbook of the Gordano Services restaurant off the M5. You can keep Shakespeare and shove Kipling up your arse—there's nothing that'll make me feel more firmly planted on the soil of myself than reading through the compliments, recommendations, and observations about its ruched curtains.

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Service stations are a liminal wonderland. They're the homesteads of the ever-transient, where everybody's been but nobody ever is. They are the gravy-scented epitome of counterpoint, of pastry-eating football fans and vegetarian Hindu families, of cut price Roy Orbison CDs, and of softly-lit, tampon-dispensing toilets.

I adore them.

I drank my first cappuccino at Forton Services, a concrete cathedral overlooking the M6.

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Fornton Services. All photographs by Martin Declan Kelly.

I ate my first Burger King beanburger as a teenager at the Moto Services off the M62 with a particularly crippling hangover. At age 14, I made my mother spend an entire week's family allowance on a seven quid tuna baked potato at Exeter services. I've shoplifted entire meals from Welcome Breaks during penniless road trips from Cornwall to Leeds, and once had a three-hour picnic on the manicured lawn of the Heston Services off the M4.

So, last weekend, I took my teeth, tongue, colon, and heart on a pilgrimage of unutterable poignancy—breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all eaten in a different service station. No farm shops. No high-finish interiors. No artisan bread. No local produce. No organic meat. Just three of the greatest service stations to ever heatlamp a plate. To say that I was excited barely hints at the quiver in my heart. I felt like Don Quixote. In a Mini.

If David Lynch sold fried eggs, he would undoubtedly do so from the Quernhow Cafe beside the old A1. A 24-hour hinterland that's now bypassed by a faster, less hungry road, this dusty, ketchup-stuck truck stop was the perfect combination of my grandmother's old front room and the sort of place where you might stumble across a naked man sharpening his toenails in the shower.

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Despite it being Sunday and therefore entirely closed to the public, I snuck in a side door to tip-toe across the lino. There were abandoned coffee cups, sun-bleached copies of Truckstop News and Truck and Plant Locators, a shelf groaning with greyhound memorabilia, pink velveteen sofas, a chipboard bar selling Fosters, and enough fabric geraniums to bury Giant Haystacks.

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Soaking up the atmosphere.

A hush hung over the place as I crept around until a boy in a tracksuit with brown fangs came out and told me they were closed. He'd just come in to change his T-shirt before heading out to the dog races in his truck. I offered to buy one of the warm bottles of Irn Bru, perhaps even an unrefrigerated sausage roll, for his trouble. But this was a man with the quaking, translucent legs of a greyhound on his mind. I could do nothing for him.

And so I walked back into the pale grey morning light and headed to Leeming Bar. Fuck Fountains Abbey and Ripon Cathedral—I was going to the Yorkshire Maid, the only place I know where you can eat a £3.75 breakfast sitting beside a plastic rabbit bin.

Leeming Bar is extraordinary. It has an empty, sun-dappled station shop selling almost nothing but tins of sucking sweets in bygone flavours—sour cherry, lemon barley—Yorkshire tea bags, and terrifying, toddler-sized scarecrows. The woman behind the counter—lavender-haired and pollen-voiced— called one of the scarecrows her boyfriend and asked me if I'd like to pose with them. I won't pretend I wasn't tempted, but I'd been up for two hours and needed breakfast.

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Quite terrifying when you're hangry.

A full fry-up, a cup of tea, a fried egg, beans on toast, a Coca-Cola, and condiments cost the princely sum of £8.84. What's more, I ate it surrounded by a coach party of white-haired, caramel-fleeced couples heading to Scotland. Behind me, a Yorkshire biker in braces and heavy boots ordered a frothy coffee and a bacon sandwich.

If ever there is talk of a nuclear war in Britain, you will find me lying across the carpet, behind the dimple glass windows of the Leeming Bar staff room. Nothing could harm me there.

In the meantime, we walked back to the car, past a post box and bathroom vending machine selling £2 deodorant under the slogan, "Why not buy one as a gift for your friend or partner?" Why not indeed?

We drove past Ropers Caravan World, the 5th Regiment Royal Artillery, and an abandoned Thrust petrol station to Scotch Corner, a service station described by a nearby Megabus driver as "fine." Beside the Portakabins and Travelodge, Scotch Corner sells everything you will never need for a drive through the Yorkshire Dales—children's wetsuits, more of those nightmarish scarecrows, the greatest hits of Neil Sedaka and Petula Clark, memory foam ladies' slippers, the Mike Tyson autobiography, and, of course, a tower of Echo Falls wine. Perfect for the lonely HGV driver on the move. I bought a coffee and 16 copies of Piece of the Action: The Best of Meatloaf. Well, Christmas is coming.

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England caps and huge cuddly monsters—all you need for a long car journey.

If you've never eaten fish and chips under a rusting, turquoise tower of asbestos overlooking the M6, then my friends, you haven't lived. Fortons Services is the St Pauls of motorway dining. I sat below a string of Help for Heroes banners eating the sort of meal that come ready-varnished in vegetable oil, served to me by a red-headed woman who apologised for the wait, but she'd had a bit of bother with "some annoying foreign people" so she "had to go and do some cleaning to calm down." Meanwhile, single women nibbled mournfully on Weight Watchers salads, a man with eyebrows the colour of his teeth ate a ruler-straight slice of Victoria sponge, and a couple in matching Native American print T-shirts sat in huge, vibrating leather chairs drinking Fanta.

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You could have a wonderful holiday at Forton Services. Take a stroll across the corridor in the sky, dine out at a choice of fine eateries (Burger King, WH Smiths, M&S Food), have a flutter at the Ladbrokes, try your arm on the Deal or No Deal arcade game. There's even a small, multi-faith room replete with three badly folded prayer mats, a tap for washing your feet, and the faint hum of fluorescent strip lighting. Prayer, nourishment, and horse racing—you don't need to be Wordsworth to know the breathings of your heart when you see them.

The Redbeck Motel has no curtains, no open sign, and no locks on its doors. It cannot and will never close. You could sit at its formica tables 24/7, playing the jukebox and drinking a mug of Horlicks while watching, as I did, a girl peel 16 boiled eggs in a row. Imagine Christmas there. Imagine New Year there. Imagine your first date, christening, and wake there.

We pulled off the A638 at dinner time, so I ordered a slice of cheese and onion quiche with salad, a coffee, a slice of red velvet cake, and a Horlicks. But I could just as easily have ordered a shower, a night in a twin room, and a glass of cognac—the motel menu is listed right there on the wall, beside the price for Lucozade.

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A little flutter before hitting the road.

As I went outside, barrel-bellied and twitching from the caffeine, a topless man with a giant eagle tattooed across his sweat-pricked back stood up, undid his flies, and downed a can of Strongbow. We smiled at eat other. I picked a piece of cress from my teeth and walked on to driving, to travel, to the road.

I've driven like a demon from station to station and found heaven beneath the heatlamp.