The Service Station

that the magic might have worn off a little bit with motorway service stations no longer seen as the exciting dining destinations that they once were and instead seen as somewhere to have a piss. This should be no surprise then that over the years some of the smaller service stations have closed due to a lack of customers and we're going to take a look at one such service station. My location is about 9 miles northwest of Leicester in Leicestershire and in preparation for this video I skim read the Wikipedia page on Leicester and they make no mention of Red Leicester cheese so I'm not sure it can be trusted. I digress so Junction 22 of the M1 9 miles northwest of Leicester near a place called Markfield. It's where we find this abandoned motorway service station that opened in 1989. It managed to survive 25 years in a competitive industry before finally closing in 2014. Despite being closer to Markfield than Leicester when it opened it was called Leicester Services and it was built by Grenada, a company who were in competition with Welcome Break who by coincidence had a service of their own a few miles to the south called Leicester Forest East. That opened in 1966. Grenada hoped to take some of the business away from Welcome Break and in an effort to deter Welcome Break from expanding their side built a hotel alongside the services offering customers an overnight stay if you want. The start of the Enver Leicester or Markfield services would be in the mid 90s where lots of complicated buyouts, mergers and reshuffles of organisations happened. That's a story for another time but after all of that Grenada had become Moto, a company that still operate motorway services to this day and they took on responsibility for the site at Markfield. There's red paint around the top of the building which is actually Grenada's colour scheme. They were the guys that built and owns the sites in the first instance. The lighter green aquamarine blue colour that's a Moto colour scheme so when they took over the sites obviously they repainted to suit their brand but as time has gone on the old Grenada original paint work is starting to show through. As part of all this reshuffling Moto lost ownership of the hotel and restaurant that operated on site and whilst they would have resulted in a loss of revenue to Moto they were at least able to charge a fee to any new businesses that would have taken on the hotel or restaurant. The sites saw moderate amounts of footfall over the years but with effectively three businesses operating on site there was no real strategy ever developed to move the site forward and grow it as a business. The revenue for many fees and the low amount of customers allowed the site to tick along but it was never really destined for great things and then in 2008 the restaurant would close. It was quickly rebranded and set up as a cost of coffee but they soon pulled out not long after setting up shop perhaps a sign of what was soon to come. Moto would then sell off their investment in the site not long after and Eurogarriages would begin leasing the site who in 2014 closed the main building without any real explanation. It seems that Eurogarriages may have been more interested investing their time and effort in other projects. And indeed the petrol station closed a few years later in 2020. Today it all sits in a very disused state with the original cross shaped building still in situ. When it first opened it was a very simple affair the service station offered just about enough of whatever you needed. The restaurant that was here operated on a 24 hour basis and offered a proper sit down Sunday lunch. Several brands and outlets would come and go over the years but Burger King, Costa and Coffee Nation were some of the last to occupy the main building. The victor in all of this would be the hotel next door as part of the mid 90s reshuffling it was rebranded as a travel lodge and has somehow managed to escape closure. Today travel lodge remains the only trading business on the site. Everything else has been abandoned and left behind. It's a real shame I can't get inside to show you what we can see because if you look through the grates and the holes close enough you can actually see that inside the electricity is still running because there are lights on but more so you can see there'still items in there. There'still things left behind from all those years ago which is absolutely fascinating to me but I can't get to it. It's out of reach. I really want to have a look inside though don't you? So is there a future for Markfield services? Well that seems quite un There doesn't appear to be any plans in place to redevelop the site or really do anything at all with it. So for now it's just going to sit there and maybe one day it'll become an insurance claim following an arson attack or maybe redeveloped into luxury flats. Probably both.