UK’s oldest service station, which Jimi Hendrix mistook for a nightclub, to be replaced by EV-friendly development
It has been a place of dubious welcome for countless drivers and a favoured late-night haunt of 1960s pop stars including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but now Britain’s oldest motorway service station, Watford Gap, faces demolition under plans to revamp the site for a new electric era.
Located at the traditional gateway to the north – or for those driving from the Midlands and north-west turning from the M6 on to the M1, a first grim intimation of the south-east – the services have had a unique place in the country’s cultural as well as geographical landscape.
