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 serving Jamaican fish jambaraya (sic) and flambe curry. In the 1960s and 70s, Peartree services near Oxford had an outdoor swimming pool at their Excelsior Motor Lodge hotel. Watford Gap services, also known as the Blue Boar, was once a bustling, all night hub where bands took to stopping in their tour vans as they travelled between venues in the north and the south of the country. For a few years, motorists collected tales of knocking elbows with the Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield and the Beatles as they tucked into their plates of ham, egg and chips.
As early as the mid-1960s, though, with about a dozen motorway services now up and running, operators were struggling to make money. In 1967, a government-commissioned review of service areas recommended adopting a “policy of least commitment”. Fancy restaurants disappeared and in came bolted-down furniture, disposable plates and cafeteria-style service on easy-clean trays. By the time Hartshead Moor opened in 1973, the glamour days were long gone. Football hooligans often clashed at service stations. In 1975, Leeds and Chelsea fans attacked each other at Birch services on the M62, ripping small trees from their stumps and smashing windows. A further government study published in 1978 found that the general quality of British service station food was awful. The same study described Hartshead Moor, only five years old at the time, as “scruffy”.
By March 2024 – and with Hartshead Moor East now being called “a right mess”, per one Google review – the staff were getting fed up with the way their workplace was perceived. “You can hear people when you’re walking around saying: ‘I don’t know why they’re saying this is the worst, it’s alright isn’t it?’” Gray told me. To the staff, the reputation felt like a cruel joke. When I met them in March 2024, they were more than ready to stop being the punchline.
***
A couple of months later, however, Gray and her team received unexpected news. Transport Focus had decided not to run the poll that year. To allow service providers more time to implement changes based on the previous year’s poll, they would not be returning until spring of 2025. For staff at Hartshead Moor East, this was a blow. Another year as Britain’s worst.
I wondered whether Welcome Break could use this time to do something drastic for their most maligned site. I thought about what Thornton had said, about knocking it down and starting again. Could they just go ahead and build something nicer? There is a sort of precedent here. While almost all UK service stations are run by a handful of private operators – Moto, Welcome Break and Roadchef are the largest – there is a family business that runs three boutique service stations with their own distinct characters. Connoisseurs speak reverently of Gloucester and Tebay, picturesque pit stops with more of the flavour of a village farm shop – local produce, lakeside views – than services. Could Welcome Break build something a bit more like that at Hartshead Moor?
According to Glenn Howells, the architect who designed Gloucester, this is a tactic Welcome Break and the others have been pursuing for some time. They emulate some of the visual language of that beloved building: a swooping roof, some nicer finishes. But to him, it ends up feeling hollow. The reason Gloucester works is because it feels genuinely local and un-corporate. “You can’t just put on a veneer of a soft rural finish,” Howells said. “A bit of Cotswold stone walling and a wobbly roof isn’t going to do it.” Even when trying to take architectural tips from Gloucester, he said, big corporations were still big corporations. “They make the money from the same concessions that you see everywhere,” he said. “And they hide the loos somewhere at the back, so you go past as many of the concessions to get to them, and that’s how they make their money – if I was being cynical about it.”
This uniformity is perhaps what makes the Transport Focus survey so competitive. It really is a comparison of like for like. What could be more galling than being told you’re the worst in a bunch that are, fundamentally, all pretty similar to you? But, paradoxically, this very sameyness may help account for why people have strong opinions about service stations. Small differences – which are really the only kind of differences that exist in this context – make a big difference.
***
For Hartshead Moor East, the extra year without a poll was not wasted. In the early months of 2025, as the survey period drew nearer, potholes were filled and extra showers were installed for lorry drivers. Welcome Break gave the front of the building a new coat of paint, replaced all the lighting in the lower deck to brighten up the place, and installed new ceilings. The Subway got self-service ordering screens.
By May 2025, there was a new manager, too. Akib Neamat, a quietly good-natured, practical sort of a guy in his early 30s, has spent his whole working life at service stations. At 19, he started working at Hartshead Moor in Welcome Break’s now defunct own-brand restaurant Eat In. Over the years, he moved around different services, but was happy to be offered the role of manager at Hartshead Moor in December 2024. He met his wife there, early in his career, when she was his supervisor. “It was quite nice to come back to a place that I’d always called home,” he told me. “I grew up quite a lot here.”
No wonder. The staff here see it all. There is joy: minibuses disgorging hen parties, ladies on race day doing their makeup en masse in the toilets, celebrity sightings. Roy Keane used to come into Hartshead Moor East when he managed Sunderland. He would buy a Twirl and tell people wanting photographs that he was Roy Keane’s brother. There are also darker sights. Police sometimes base themselves there to deal with road deaths. The staff have had to prevent drunk drivers getting back on the road. The night before I visited in 2024, a woman had been attacked by her partner in the car park. She had fled into the service station, locked herself in the toilets and asked another woman to go and get staff. The police were called, and they eventually had to pepper spray the man. “It’s like the weather,” Gray had told me. “Never two days the same.”
As Neamat stepped into his new role as manager, the Transport Focus poll was, of course, on his mind. And in the days leading up to the arrival of the pollsters in May 2025, he was feeling confident. Unbeknownst to anybody at Hartshead Moor, however, a series of events were being set in motion that would have profound consequences for their service station. Marks & Spencer was being hacked. Over the Easter weekend, M&S shops around the country experienced payment failures and broken tills, and the company was issued with a hefty ransom demand for the control of their systems.
On 12 May, just one day before the beginning of the period during which pollsters were due to arrive at services up and down the country, Neamat was told that Transport Focus had cancelled the survey. Because Moto and Extra services have M&S units in them, and their service was being disrupted by the hack, the results might reflect customer disgruntlement with a half-functioning M&S rather than a true picture of the station’s quality. Although it is run independently, the survey is paid for jointly by the operators, and if they don’t want it to run, it doesn’t. So it didn’t. Again.
Neamat had broken the news at the weekly Monday afternoon meeting, in a conference room deep in the bowels of Hartshead Moor. He winced at the memory. “Everyone was all geared up, ready for it. ‘Oh yeah, this is going to be great. We can get ourselves off the bottom of that list.’ And then to be told at the last minute it’s not happening?” Thornton had been particularly exasperated: “At that point we were like, we can’t be at the bottom indefinitely,” she told me.
***
And so it was that, as 2025 disappeared in the rearview mirror, I entered my third calendar year of working on a story about motorway service stations. During the previous 12 months, I had bought my first car, a down-at-heel but sensible VW Polo. I had done a lot more driving. I had grown more familiar with the motorway’s loveless expanse, the minutes slipping into hours behind the wheel. I had got my first flat tyre and experienced the peculiar kind of open-air imprisonment that the hard shoulder provides. What would I not have given, then, for a packet sandwich and a clean-enough toilet? I thought longingly about the simple but restorative offerings of a service station.
Simple, but restorative. That is what we want from a services. But it’s not necessarily what we think we want. Those early days of the motorway do sound delightful, when you could avail yourself of, for instance, half a lobster au gratin at Forton Pennine Tower. Why can’t we have that back, we wonder. Why do we now get sausage rolls and cardboard cups of coffee?
One reason can be summed up in a single phrase, familiar to all in the service station world: “Destination in its own right.” It’s the wording that has been used by the Department for Transport since 1980 to prohibit motorway service area operators from offering anything that might entice people on to the road with the sole purpose of visiting their service stations, thereby overloading the motorways. If an amenity was considered exciting enough to bring in people who would not otherwise be on the road, it was nixed. No swimming pools, no outre shops, no glitzy restaurants, nothing too delicious, nothing too fun. There is, in essence, a legal requirement that service stations cannot be too good.
It is not always easy to stay on the right side of this vague stipulation. In 1990, Newport Pagnell received an official castigation for trying to over-celebrate 30 years of service stations: they wanted to invite Margaret Thatcher to attend a party, but the DfT said no. For Ellie Wilson, Welcome Break’s marketing manager, the rules are a daily challenge, a perverse paradox at the heart of her work. “We struggle with that a lot, because our role in customer marketing is to improve the customer experience,” she said. She was acutely aware that to pull itself off the bottom, Hartshead Moor East needed to become nice. But not too nice.
Wilson said something else that stuck with me. “Service stations are a good indicator, maybe, of a country’s culture.” How do our services compare with what the rest of the world has put on the sides of their motorways? I found myself at a service station in Albania recently, which contained a statue of the Virgin Mary, a fully stocked bar and people merrily smoking underneath a chandelier. In the US, they don’t have a direct counterpart to our motorway services but a state-by-state patchwork of truck stops, gas stations, behemoth novelty chains such as Buc-ee’s (presided over by a toothy beaver mascot) and “rest areas” that are places for you to stop and eat your own food. Italy’s “autogrills”, which serve fresh pastries and good coffee, and stock a wide range of salami, are beloved by locals and travellers alike. They represent a vestige of the Italian practice of going for a drive on the motorway as a pastime in itself, which came and went in Britain back in the 1960s. In Moroccan service stations, you can reportedly get a genuinely good tagine.
The truth is that not being allowed to be “destinations in their own right” isn’t the main reason our service stations aren’t more exciting. The main reason is us. Customer feedback consistently suggests that people want sit-down meals back, a return to something like the nostalgic era of Little Chef restaurants. To meet this demand, between 2017 and 2020, Welcome Break opened branches of Pizza Express across some of its sites. But people didn’t eat in them. Two of the Pizza Express branches have closed this year alone. “People haven’t got a lot of time to stop these days,” said Rich Cross, a 28-year-old motorway services fanatic from Bristol who has visited every service station in Great Britain and contributes to the extraordinarily exhaustive website motorwayservices.uk. “It’s all sort of focused around speed of service and getting [customers] what they want as quick as possible essentially.”
The occasional Tebay or Gloucester is nice to have, but they are not what the majority of people truly desire. If our service stations say something about who we are, then one of the things they say is that we’re a nation of people who like to complain about how things were better once, or elsewhere. Who relish moaning about how we want something different, but whose actual desires are more basic than we like to admit. We prize efficiency, reliability, mundanity. “There’s an attraction to certain kinds of gone-to-seed parts of English life,” said Joe Moran, author of a 2009 history of Britain’s motorways, On Roads. “Things like seaside resorts out of season, or rainy northern towns.” Our services are not, ultimately, all that great. And that is what we love them for, in our begrudging, irony-inflected way. As Moran puts it, they mine “a rich seam of English ordinariness”.
I asked Cross about his view of Hartshead Moor East. “She’s an old girl. Never going to be able to compete with a Skelton Lake, is it?” he said. Leeds Skelton Lake has an RSPB bird-viewing platform. Hartshead Moor East has Burger King.
***
Finally, in May 2026, the hi-vis-vest-clad pollsters arrived at Hartshead Moor East. Once again, I had not been permitted to know when they were coming, so I headed back up to the station when the polling period was over. On the August day I visited, the station did, to its credit, look better than it had two years previously. A dad and his pink-haired teenage daughter were eating granola bars and staring at their phones in silence under the freshly installed ceiling panels. Tradesmen were getting a Subway under newly bright lights. Stamping his foot on noticeably shinier white flooring outside WH Smith, a little boy was expressing his need for a travel pillow with a sloth’s face on it.
Millie Thornton was still there, and so was Sarah Hunter, a recent recipient of the Welcome Break 20 years of service badge, which she wore on her lanyard. She had been on shift for many of the Transport Focus visits. It was impossible to know how things had gone until the results came out – “Can’t bribe them. I’ve tried,” said another member of staff – but the pollsters had told them they were hearing good things from customers. “They just kept saying it’s positive feedback, which was really nice to hear,” Hunter said.
Around the station, staff were generally optimistic about their chances. The work done on the building, the effort put in by the teams – it would all surely add up. A hat-trick of last-place positions in the poll would be more than they could take. “I’d be disheartened if we were at the bottom again, massively disheartened,” Neamat told me. I asked Julie Pygott, who has worked in the WH Smith for the past nine years, how she would feel if they came bottom again. Also present for this meeting was Ellie Wilson, the Welcome Break marketing manager. “Keep it clean,” Wilson interjected. Pygott paused. “I just don’t know,” she eventually said. “It’s not true. That’s what I would say: it’s just not true.”
On another visit to the station later that month, I finally got talking to my fellow drivers. I have spent a lot of time in my career approaching strangers to ask them questions, and never have I encountered so uniform a response than at this service station: bemusement shaded with mild panic. Tom, a man in his 30s on his way to Ipswich, was overseeing his St Bernard tucking into something billing itself as an ice-cream puppuccino pop. As the dog slurped, and I explained what I was doing, he started to laugh. What did he think of Hartshead Moor? “It’s got the dog lollies, so it suits me.” Then a pause. “It’s a services really, isn’t it?”
The service station is one of society’s great levellers. There is no such thing as a VIP service station. All life is there: young and old, rich and poor, well- and ill-intentioned, all with empty stomachs and bladders full. It renders us all anonymous. Sometimes, people make intentional use of the benign indifference of services. For instance, a man named David Lawrence told me that during the 70s and 80s, a group of cross-dressers used to meet at a service station near Manchester where they could be with each other freely without fear of being recognised. Less movingly, petty crime has always flourished at services for the same reason.
One of my trips to Hartshead Moor this summer happened to coincide with the partial eclipse. On my drive back to London, I decided to pull over for the moment itself, envisaging a suddenly dark motorway and some lethal rubbernecking that might cause a crash that would result in my death before my service stations piece was finished.
The nearest services was Newport Pagnell, one of the first to open in the UK, in 1959. On its first trading day, it had to open two hours earlier than planned because there was such a crowd of people waiting outside to see it. On the day I visited, 67 years later, the car park was busy. Children sat on car roofs pointing iPads at the sun. One couple were prodding a hole in a piece of paper with an earring. I wandered over to a group of women who had eclipse glasses, and waited for the darkness to fall. The moon slipped over the sun, and then slipped off again as we all gazed upwards, a briefly and randomly assembled cross-section of society, united for this half-hour by the chance circumstance of us being on the motorway at the same time, soon to go our separate ways for ever.
***
I spent the months before the Transport Focus results were due to be announced in a state of unease. The survey data had been collected. That was certainly an improvement on the previous two years. But so many years into this project, I had learned to take nothing for granted. Perhaps an earthquake would destroy Transport Focus’s Manchester office and bury the survey with it. I was beginning to feel as if some kind of curse had been placed on this article, or that I had absorbed some of the bad luck Hartshead Moor itself had experienced. But I was also nervous on behalf of the staff if the survey results did indeed come out as scheduled. Hopes were high. Thornton was setting her sights on breaking the top half, whereas Hunter’s dreams were more modest (top 75). For both of them, though, the excitement was palpable. “It’s been too long,” Thornton said. “We just want to know.”
As the clock ticked down towards the grand reveal of the first Transport Focus survey in three years, buzz built across the service stations world. I spoke to Ken McMeikan, the chief executive of Moto, the company that runs the celebrated Rugby services. He told me he would “love to win it for a third time”, but he wasn’t being complacent. “I think Rugby and Sawtry will definitely be challenging for the No 1,” he said. I caught up with Janine Gray, the previous Hartshead Moor East manager, on the phone. She works at Leicester Forest East now but, a year on, was still irked that the 2025 poll had been cancelled. “You feel a bit like there’s unfinished business,” she said.
Before I received my formal invitation to attend the unveiling of the Transport Focus survey results, which would be held at Rotherham services, I had been imagining some kind of party. What’s it like? I asked Louise Collins, the director of Transport Focus. Is it a drinks thing? She blinked at me and laughed. No, she said. Everyone drives there.
Everyone except me, it would turn out. You may remember that I claimed, in what no doubt seemed a rhetorical flourish, that writing this piece nearly cost me my life. I was not exaggerating. I had planned to spend the night before the ceremony at Hartshead Moor’s Days Inn hotel (despite Rich Cross advising me, from experience, that I would not find that experience delightful). So, on Monday 9 November, I set off from my house in south London in the car I had bought only six months before, to drive the four hours up to the services. Ten minutes into that drive, on the north side of Vauxhall Bridge, directly beneath Riverwalk, the building immortalised on the front cover of Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestseller London Falling, I was rear-ended by an SUV with enough force to not only destroy my car beyond repair, but to cause a three-car pileup ahead of me, in which another vehicle was lifted clean off the ground by a Maserati rammed underneath it. By some miracle, nobody was seriously injured, and I escaped with a bump on my head and a mild concussion. Unfortunately, I now had no car, 12 hours before I was due to report from a service station. There was, without question now, some kind of curse at play here. And I feared Hartshead Moor East would have to get off the bottom of the poll for it to be broken.
***
On Tuesday morning I took the train to Sheffield, and an Uber from there to Rotherham services for the Transport Focus ceremony, arriving at about 10am. It was Welcome Break’s turn to host the event, and they had chosen their razzliest, dazzliest new services – completed last year – to show the competition what they were capable of.
What Welcome Break is capable of, it seems, is producing a service station that looks on the outside like a regional airport, and on the inside like a stage set of an English town square. Rotherham is an enormous, 32,000-sq ft re-imagining of a Yorkshire village. Amy Holmes, on Welcome Break’s design team, told me that those two words, “Yorkshire village”, were the only two words they were given by the parent company’s chief executive to steer them. Inside the station, I found lamp-posts, fake flower beds and mock street signs such as “Retail Road” above a branch of Waitrose that had window-shaped holes in the facade. The Burger King had faux mansard roofing, and the top of the Starbucks appeared to be covered in plastic grass. It felt like a corporate slant on the notion of localness, just as Glenn Howells had foretold.
The survey results were being announced at 11am, and by 10.30am, the gigantic station contained pockets of guests from the upper echelons of service station world – a glimpse of open shirts and suits and sensible business heels among the regular punters. After some hobnobbing, during which Ken McMeikan of Moto told me about a recent trip to China to check out what they were doing over there with services (malls with fuel, in essence – and decidedly “destinations”, as he put it), we filed up an escalator flanked by green and white balloons to a mezzanine level that houses a soft-play area and a makeshift presentation space, where we would be hearing which station had soared to victory and which would languish at the bottom.
After opening remarks from Nigel Stevens, the chair of the board at Transport Focus, eventually the time came to announce which services had won: the grand coronation. Or not, as it turned out. “This is supposed to be the moment of the great reveal of who’s No 1, but …” he said, trailing off. “John, you better come up here, because I think you might be the winner.” At this, John Diviney, the chief executive of Welcome Break, stood up. Stevens handed him a glass trophy the size and dimensions of a paperback book, and he sat down again.
It was a strange moment: one which plainly called for some kind of moment of suspense, giving way to the popping of champagne corks. But everyone in attendance already knew that Rotherham had won, squeaking in ahead of Rugby. Transport Focus had given the operators the survey results weeks in advance of this event, so they could get going on making improvements. I was, personally, disappointed by the lack of ceremony. But the decision to do it like this was practical: it served a purpose, and as a consequence was underwhelming. Just like, I suppose, a service station.
I hadn’t come to hear who won, though. I had come to hear about Hartshead Moor East. The news, at last, was good. They didn’t just haul themselves off the bottom spot. They didn’t just break the top half. They came 33rd out of 123, a majestic leap up the league table that made them the single most improved site on 2026’s survey. At the presentation, they were held up as a beacon for other services to follow. “Sites will look at these results,” said Diviney in his speech, “and ask: ‘How can we be the next Rotherham? Can we be a Hartshead?’” To be a Hartshead: now a goal to aim for.
The operators knew the results in advance. The staff at the each of the service stations, however, did not. The first thing Akib Neamat did when he woke up at 6am on Tuesday morning was to Google “Transport Focus”. And there it was. His station, their station, the most improved. I rang him that afternoon. “The vibe on site today has been ecstatic,” he told me. He called a meeting with his staff when he arrived at 8am, and told them the news, which was met with cheers and the biggest smiles he had ever seen at Hartshead Moor. The curse, after three long years, had been lifted.
• This article was amended on 12 November 2026 to clarify that Janine Gray was at Skelton Lake services for the 2023 awards ceremony, which is south-east of Leeds, not north-east as an earlier version said.
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