Small country garages remind me of a time before much of the motorway network was complete, when my father would religiously follow yellow HR (Holiday Route) signs through places like Tiverton, Holsworthy and Torrington to reach our holiday destination. During the early 1970’s it was mostly an attended service and you didn’t expect the shopping opportunities of a small supermarket. The map, however, has changed, in a very short time span, and the small country garage no longer fits onto it; superseded by a more functional road network, more efficient vehicles, and the seemingly never ending expansion of supermarket garage forecourts; selling things that the motorist of the 1970’s may have considered irrelevant. The writer David McKie, in his article Death of the Filling Station, suggested that the dictionary definition of such an establishment will have to be changed to, “That area of a supermarket campus where motorists fill up their cars.”

In 2004 independent sites numbered 6,182, half the 1990 number, whereas supermarket sights tripled to 1,111 during the same period. It is unlikely that the disappearance of forecourts across the country will arouse as much sentimentality as it does in the USA; where there are a number of publications dedicated to the subject of retrograde garages; including within their pages nostalgic images of eccentric gas stations modelled as airplanes, teepees, windmills and railroad tank cars. The synopsis of ‘Fantastic Filling Stations’ demonstrates such sentimentality for the classic gas station when it states, “Once an integral part of daily American life, the traditional full service station has given way to sterile convenience stores with automated, pay at the pump service”. Such hostility to the modern supermarket forecourt is absent on this side of the Atlantic, as David McKie says of British filling stations that, “…aesthetically the death of a filling station is often a bonus. One used to drive through some gentle harmonious village where one note of shrieking discord was the garish display which the garage proprieter had devised in hope of catching the eye of the passing motorist”.

Images of old style American gas stations do fill the British media; in magazine advertisements for cigarettes, animated TV adverts for cars or via American films shown on British TV. In Britain we recognise the emblem and appreciate the nostalgia that exists for American gas stations but the British filling station was never such a cherished part of our landscape; discordant rather than an integral part of it.