‘We can’t be at the bottom indefinitely’: Can Britain’s most maligned service station be turned around?

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In 2022 and 2023, Hartshead Moor East, near Leeds, was voted the worst in Great Britain. Ever since, staff have been on a mission to redeem its reputationThe crime issue of the…

In 2022 and 2023, Hartshead Moor East, near Leeds, was voted the worst in Great Britain. Ever since, staff have been on a mission to redeem its reputation

In October 2023, at a service station on the M1 north-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…

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