Latest news with #EgonRonay
Scottish Sun
6 days ago
- Scottish Sun
Inside ‘appalling' £14m space-age tower once home to UK's highest motorway restaurant that's rotted away for 35 years
Nostalgic Brits discussed their previous visits to the tower FROZEN IN TIME Inside 'appalling' £14m space-age tower once home to UK's highest motorway restaurant that's rotted away for 35 years AN ABANDONED tower which was once home to the UK's highest motorway restaurant continues to rot away decades after its closure. The Forton Services, close to Lancaster, waved in motorists using the 3.5-mile stretch of the M6 for the first time in 1965. Advertisement 3 Forton Services, located on the M6 motorway, was the location of The Pennine Tower restaurant Credit: Alamy 3 The hexagonal tower under construction in December 1964 Credit: Getty The eye-catching hexagonal Pennine Tower formed part of the complex, and quickly became the site of a posh restaurant for famished drivers. Diners regularly tucked into grilled rainbow trout, fillet steaks, lobster, and local favourites like Lancashire Hot Pot and potted shrimps. It boasted dramatic views of the nearby Morecambe Bay and was likened to a UFO by some visitors. The Forton Services also came complete with self-service cafeterias, baby changing facilities, and showers for lorry drivers. Advertisement Noreen Blackburn, a former waitress at the Pennine Tower, shared her experiences working at the now-dormant eatery. She said: "As I was eager to learn, my next job was serving tea and coffee tea was made in a huge teapot and poured as necessary coaches made the place very busy. "The phrase used was the 'tea and pee brigade'. "However, my greatest wish was to be a waitress in the 'tower' and I really pushed the catering manager to consider me. Advertisement "The uniform was so chic in a shade of mid-green with a pencil slim skirt which had to be just above knee level, a white blouse, a waistcoat with shiny chrome buttons and a Top Rank emblem embroidered on it." The shine quickly wore off, with the restaurant slammed as "an insult to one's taste buds" by prominent food critic Egon Ronay. Abandoned iconic UK stadium left to rot 110 years after hosting FA Cup final getting new lease of life The Forton Services became better known as a rendez-vous point for truckers and pulled the plug in 1989. Recognising its significance, they awarded the tower Grade II listed status in 2012. Advertisement Detailing its pedigree, the Historic England website says: "Forton demonstrated a new popularist architecture ideally suited to the democratic new aesthetic of the motorway. "The Pennine Tower Restaurant acting both as a beacon to attract the passing motorists and as a glamorous vantage point from which they were able to enjoy spectacular prospects of the motorway below and more extensively over the miles of surrounding countryside through which they [are] passing." Historic England also selected the Pennine Tower amongst eight pieces of architectural prowess inspired by the 1960s space race, culminating in 1969's lunar landing. It cited Forton services as an example of 'Space-age architecture', cheekily describing it as a "Star Wars ship next to a motorway". Advertisement Online user Rob590 fondly recalled his visits to the unique building. "[In the '90s] Forton was one of the first buildings I grew to love," he said. "From our end it was the first landmark that you were going somewhere - Preston, Blackpool, Manchester or maybe even further. "It seemed impossibly huge, and to my eyes reinforced that we'd left our rural county for something bigger, modern and better." Advertisement
The Irish Sun
6 days ago
- Automotive
- The Irish Sun
Inside ‘appalling' £14m space-age tower once home to UK's highest motorway restaurant that's rotted away for 35 years
AN ABANDONED tower which was once home to the UK's highest motorway restaurant continues to rot away decades after its closure. The Forton Services, close to Advertisement 3 Forton Services, located on the M6 motorway, was the location of The Pennine Tower restaurant Credit: Alamy 3 The hexagonal tower under construction in December 1964 Credit: Getty The eye-catching hexagonal Pennine Tower formed part of the complex, and quickly became the site of a posh restaurant for famished drivers. Diners regularly tucked into grilled rainbow trout, fillet steaks, lobster, and local favourites like Lancashire Hot Pot and potted shrimps. It boasted dramatic views of the nearby Morecambe Bay and was likened to a UFO by some visitors. The Forton Services also came complete with self-service cafeterias, baby changing facilities, and showers for lorry drivers. Advertisement read more in motors Noreen Blackburn, a former waitress at the Pennine Tower, shared her experiences working at the now-dormant eatery. She said: "As I was eager to learn, my next job was serving tea and coffee tea was made in a huge teapot and poured as necessary coaches made the place very busy. "The phrase used was the 'tea and pee brigade'. "However, my greatest wish was to be a waitress in the 'tower' and I really pushed the catering manager to consider me. Advertisement Most read in Motors Exclusive "The uniform was so chic in a shade of mid-green with a pencil slim skirt which had to be just above knee level, a white blouse, a waistcoat with shiny chrome buttons and a Top Rank emblem embroidered on it." The shine quickly wore off, with the restaurant slammed as "an insult to one's taste buds" by prominent food critic Egon Ronay. Abandoned iconic UK stadium left to rot 110 years after hosting FA Cup final getting new lease of life The Forton Services became better known as a rendez-vous point for truckers and pulled the plug in 1989. Recognising its significance, they awarded the tower Grade II listed status in 2012. Advertisement Detailing its pedigree, the Historic England website says: "Forton demonstrated a new popularist architecture ideally suited to the democratic new aesthetic of the motorway. "The Pennine Tower Restaurant acting both as a beacon to attract the passing motorists and as a glamorous vantage point from which they were able to enjoy spectacular prospects of the motorway below and more extensively over the miles of surrounding countryside through which they [are] passing." Historic England also selected the Pennine Tower amongst eight pieces of architectural prowess inspired by the 1960s space race, culminating in 1969's lunar landing. It cited Forton services as an example of 'Space-age architecture', cheekily describing it as a "Star Wars ship next to a motorway". Advertisement Online user Rob590 fondly recalled his visits to the unique building. "[In the '90s] Forton was one of the first buildings I grew to love," he said. "From our end it was the first landmark that you were going somewhere - Preston, Blackpool, Manchester or maybe even further. "It seemed impossibly huge, and to my eyes reinforced that we'd left our rural county for something bigger, modern and better." Advertisement 3 The building was awarded listed status by English Heritage Credit: Alamy
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Esther Ronay, documentary-maker who fought for women both in her films and behind the camera
Esther Ronay, who has died aged 85, was a documentary film-maker who was fearless in challenging the norms of the time; she was also a sometimes formidable character who bucked against the male-dominated world of film. A woman of intense passions, she objected to being 'treated like a housewife' as a film editor: 'I was expected to keep [the men at work] company at lunch and dinner if they were working late and they were alone,' she recalled. She was the daughter of the Hungarian gourmet – and later Daily and Sunday Telegraph columnist – Egon Ronay, who was on the brink of being deported to the Nazi death camps when the Soviet army began the liberation of his native Budapest in December 1944. The elder of two daughters, Esther Annamária Ronay was born in Budapest on August 24 1940. Her mother's family, the Rudolfs, were of the Hungarian landed gentry, forced by diminished circumstances to enter the civil service and the judiciary. They objected strongly to their daughter Edit marrying the Jewish Egon Ronay; they boycotted the wedding and refused to speak to the couple until the birth of Esther broke the impasse. The Ronays, who belonged to the elite assimilated Magyar-Jewish merchant class, owned some of the best restaurants in Budapest; Egon Ronay claimed that his father was 'Budapest's fifth-highest taxpayer'. After the war, however, the communists seized the family business, and in 1946 Egon fled to London, where Esther soon joined him along with her mother and baby sister Edina. Her grandfather would spend two years in a Hungarian labour camp as part of a communist crackdown on 'bourgeois enemies of the state'. Egon Ronay went on to wage war on mediocre British food, launching Ronay's Guides to eateries. But although Esther Ronay was immensely proud of her father's resurrection of his fortunes, she resented being introduced as 'the daughter of Egon Ronay'. 'My father is a redoubtable Thatcherite,' she would say. 'I'm a diehard socialist.' Her political convictions never tempted her to abandon the crisp clarity of her upper-class English accent; to do so, she felt, would have made her a phoney. It did not bother her in the least to be nicknamed 'the Duchess' at meetings of the Womens' Rights Movement in the East End of London, or on trips to Belfast when, though not a supporter of the IRA, she visited women prisoners on hunger strike. Esther Ronay possessed what she called her father's gift for 'leaving the wrong place at the right time', and in 1969 she had something of a narrow escape in Los Angeles. She had been invited to Roman Polanski's house by his friend, the Polish scriptwriter Wojciech Frykowski, but left the gathering, bored by the excessive use of hard drugs by some of her fellow house guests, which 'rendered them like zombies and made them very poor company'. A few days later Frykowski, along with Polanski's pregnant wife Sharon Tate and three others, was murdered by members of the Manson Family. Esther Ronay devoted much of her energy to intellectual pursuits. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s she was sought-after as a documentary editor at the BBC, where she proved a tough taskmaster who would not suffer artistic tantrums from directors or producers, no matter how well-established. With the London Women's Film Group she made the animation Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair (1978), which dissected Grimms' fairy tales from a feminist viewpoint. Among the documentaries she worked on were Women of the Rhondda (1972), about the wives of the striking coal miners in the Rhondda Valley in the 1920s and 1930s, and Fifties Features (1986), about how women were depicted on screen in the 1950s, and the effect this had off-screen. After the collapse of communism in 1989 she left London for her native Budapest. In 1991 she made an award-winning documentary for the Arts Council, Beyond the Forest: Hungarian Music in Transylvania, about the nearly lost art of Hungarian Roma music, which had been suppressed by the Ceaușescu regime in Romania but brought back illegally to Hungary through traditional dance-houses. Esther Ronay was a modest woman who seldom mentioned her glamorous and exciting past. She rarely spoke about the year she spent in Italy as personal assistant to the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, nor of her friendship with CLR James, the Trinidadian historian who was a friend of Trotsky and who wrote the brilliant cricket memoir Beyond a Boundary (1963). Esther Ronay was often pressed by friends to write her own memoir, but in vain. She never married, although she had no shortage of proposals. She blamed Malcolm Muggeridge for the break-up of her two-year relationship with the film director Kevin Billington. Invited to her flat for dinner, Muggeridge had found her opinions, especially on religion and politics, too forthright. Billington, who was influenced by Muggeridge's formidable intellect and easily swayed by his prejudices, later married the novelist Rachel Pakenham, daughter of the Earl of Longford, instead. Thereafter, Esther always referred to Muggeridge as 'that zealot and convert', adding: 'And to think that his father was a socialist.' Esther Ronay had a severe fall at the Transylvania Book Festival in 2018. She was nearly 80 at the time but dismissed all offers of medical help with the riposte: 'There's a very good-looking veterinary surgeon attending the festival – he can have a look at me.' Esther Ronay is survived by her younger sister, the fashion designer and actress Edina Ronay. Esther Ronay, born August 24 1940, died February 16 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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