Skip to main content

The motorway disservice station

"Mushy peas? One slice or two..?"

Cumbria is great at a hell of a lot of things.

Fabulous tourist attractions, breathtaking scenery, attractive sheep, innovative small businesses and miles of dry stone walls, for instance. Where did all that stone come from, by the way? Is that why the lakes are there? So when Transport Focus, the travel watchdog, issued the results of it’s survey about England’s best motorway service stations, I presumed Cumbria would be right up there.

We are on the list. Just not at the top. No, that was Norton Canes on the M6 Toll road in Staffordshire, and they’re right. It’s dreamy. There were 111 pee and petrol stop-offs on the list, and Cumbria’s Southwaite (Northbound) on the M6 bagged the coveted 109th place on the list.

Bravo, Moto. You may operate two of the top five, but you also ‘run’ four out of the worst five. The surveyors asked 9,600 customers what they thought about the essential things that make your break for ridiculously expensive petrol worthwhile, including toilet facilities, food and staffing.

Opening in 1972, the delightful Southwaite Services nestles between junctions 41 and 42 of the M6, bringing shame to the nearby village whose name it pinched. According to review website Tripadvisor, despite a terrible 2 out of 5 rating, it’s not the worst place to eat in Southwaite. Something to be proud of there, then.

Approximately 7 miles south of Carlisle, it’s just far enough away from the town to mean you have absolutely no reason to go there.

Of the 110 reviews, 2% actually rated it as excellent (presumably the Manager or someone who didn’t understand how rating systems work), but a whopping 49% thought it was terrible.

Reading the comments leaves you a strange mixture of depressed, sad and a bit nauseous. Not just that, but a bit baffled too. For example, a review by Tixilix about the “disgusting toilets” suggests they “need to be cleaned a lot more frequently and thoroughly ie walls avoid”. Avoid the walls? I think you’re doing it wrong, Tixilix.

Ross K felt that he was served a “Disgusting extortionate breakfast”, which conjures up worrying visions of a desperately ugly sausage trying to blackmail you.

Some of the more positive reviews included ringing endorsements like “OK for toilet use” and “Couldn’t get out quick enough”.

Binnes1 concludes that it is the “Worst Services I’ve ever been in.” Oh come on. That’s a bit unfair. Third worst, surely. Out of 111.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 27th of July 2018, where it was re-titled as "Doing us all a big disservice".

I've not had the pleasure of visiting Southwaite Services... by the sound of it, I'm one of the lucky ones.

(CD A-Z: A homemade compilation of some mash-ups. Yeah. I'm down wiv da kids, isn't it, tho.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...