A new book reveals a fascinating social history behind Britain’s highways, William Leece discovers

IT CAN be a hard life, that of an academic researcher. Not always is it measured out in the calm scholastic atmosphere of senior common rooms, libraries and laboratories.

It can take you to faraway places, probing the ice caps of Antarctica, studying the tribesmen of Amazonia or diving to the depths of the oceanic abyss.

It can also take you for a weekend at Newport Pagnell services, on the M1.

Joe Moran, from Liverpool John Moores University, seems to have survived the experience unscathed, however. Newport Pagnell was the first fully-open service station anywhere on a British motorway, and has been in business since August, 1960.

At one time, it was the brave new world of feeding Britons on the move, but more recently held up as an example of the sheer awfulness of motorway catering.

But, like everywhere else by Britain’s roads, it has a story to tell, for better or for worse.

“After midnight, gigging musicians would bump into each other at the M1 service stations and exchange gossip about venues and recording deals,” Joe concluded in his researches, now published as On Roads: a Hidden History.

“The Beatles, according to one Newport Pagnell counter assistant, were ‘very unruly’ and threw bread rolls at Brian Epstein.

“Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason, recalled the Blue Boar at Watford Gap at two o’clock on a Sunday morning looking like a Ford Transit van rally, as bands made their way back from gigs and ‘crushed velvet trousers outnumbered truckers’ overalls’.

“When Jimi Hendrix arrived in Britain, he heard the name ‘Blue Boar’ so often he thought it was a new nightclub and asked which band was playing there that night.”

Joe Moran’s book is full of these insights and vignettes, snapshots of modern life maybe a couple of stages removed from the road theme that links them through over 300 pages.

But which came first for Joe, reader in cultural history at the JMU: the roads themselves or the stories attached to them?

“I’m interested generally in the everyday things that people take for granted, or are so familiar that people don't really notice them,” he says.