Why truck stop cafés trump motorway service stations

Spectator

6 days ago

There's something about motorway service stations that seems to encourage the very worst in human behaviour. They're places where no doubt usually responsible members of society have long decided that it's permissible to drop semi-industrial amounts of litter on to the verges, urinate all over the toilet floor and belch with impunity while queuing up for a Whopper at Burger King.
For me, it was the full-to-the-brim child's nappy that someone had left on a chair in the revolting 'sit down café' at a services near Preston that made me decide that I would never set foot in a Welcome Break, Moto or Roadchef ever again. I'm lucky; I have a bladder that can tolerate journeys of four or five hours by car. My fiancée, however, is not equipped with such sturdiness. So, over the past few years, we've been seeking out alternative forms of respite from the road.
Truck stops are, I always assumed, not the kind of establishment in which a journalist and an intensive care nurse on their holidays would be welcome. Perhaps like many people not involved in the heavy transportation industry, I assumed these were malodorous, members-only places where entry would strictly be restricted to men of a certain age who were covered in axle grease and wearing grimy hi-vis jackets with trousers that comfortably showed at least two-thirds of their backside at any given time. My pompous snobbery was duly kicked into touch when we stumbled across Skelmersdale truck stop café.
The first thing to tell you about truck stops is that they are not hard to find, presuming you have a smartphone. Nearly always independently owned and typically situated in an industrial estate around ten minutes' drive from the motorway itself, the locations are frequently aesthetically unedifying. So far, so absolutely predictable, you might say.
But what surprised us was the welcome that a couple in a 2014 Ford Focus attracted when pulling into these places. Firstly, there is always parking for cars, as well as articulated lorries. And secondly, there's absolutely no grumpy official telling you that the place is for Eddie Stobart employees only.
Inside the café itself; well, the décor is not going to be to the tastes of Philippe Starck. But, then again, neither would the interior of a Welcome Break. Be in no doubt, truck stop cafés are greasy spoons of the type that you seldom see on high streets any more. There will be Formica. There will be a TV showing (silently) football highlights from Bosnia or Colombia. There will be several red-top newspapers discarded across the tables.
But there will also be an invariably cheerful woman ready to take your order at the counter for a made-from-scratch cooked breakfast of outstanding quality, and at a price that wouldn't get you a Rustlers microwave burger at a petrol station. Last summer, my Skelmersdale trucker breakfast of two bacon rashers, two sausages, fried egg, black pudding, beans, mushrooms and two slices of toast cost £4. I didn't need to eat again for 12 hours.
The typical truck stop café (and there are dozens and dozens of them around the UK) doesn't limit itself to fry-ups, either. Since then I've eaten cottage pies, Cajun wraps, chicken curry, asparagus soup and carrot cake. You'll seldom find a main course that costs more than a fiver and the tea usually comes in mugs that could comfortably hold a tenner's worth of 1p pieces.
It's worth remembering the first table-service restaurant in the world was set up to cater for road users. Boulanger's, located near the present day Rue de Louvre in Paris, opened in 1765 to offer 'restoratives' to travellers, including meat broths and sheep's foot in white sauce. The truck stops of Britain today are doing little more than replicating the ethos of Boulanger's. The food isn't intended for, or marketed toward, the majority of the general public. It's simple, homemade, exceptionally keenly priced, and best enjoyed while engaging in low-level conversation with your partner about the road ahead and the likelihood of getting good reception for Radio 4 on the car radio once north of Peebles.
The only worry I have about truck stops is that they're seldom very busy. No matter how many trucks there are in the vast parking areas, I've never been to a truck stop café that is anything more than 10 per cent full. It's gratifying after myriad experiences waiting in the festival-length queues for the toilets at a Moto. But I suspect that many of these homespun operations would actually welcome a few more diners who aren't behind the wheel of a ten-ton behemoth.
Perhaps the truckers are only here to sleep in their bunk behind the wheel or simply use the shower facilities. But what's become clear to me since I began using truck stops is that it's not necessary to complain about the appalling state of our 'mainstream' service stations when there are so many superior alternatives which we car drivers simply don't use. I no longer gripe about the state of a typical Welcome Break. I just make for the Red Lion truck stop near Northampton (which even sells its own range of sweaters, T-shirts and other merchandise), the Bury St Edmunds lorry park (which is unusually well signposted) or the Lesmahagow truck stop in Lanarkshire, which offers superb views of the rolling hills of the Clyde Valley.
Of course, you could just pack your own sandwiches, 'hold it in' and not stop at all on a long drive. But there's something about a cooked breakfast on the road that brings out the Jack Kerouac spirit in me. OK, I'm not jumping off goods trains in Colorado in the dead of night while wired on Benzedrine. But I am hungry. And a litre of tea and some fried bread in a truck stop café beautifully evokes the original itinerant elan of longer haul road trips.
Truck stops are the places where the loners, the drifters, the riders of the night congregate for warmth and sustenance. And, as I'm now certain, they're eating better than anyone joining the queue at a motorway Costa.