Meals on Wheels
By Sarah Franklin
9 Jun 2009
I love to travel, I love to drive, I also love to eat which means that I have to stop for refreshment. If you are travelling on the motorways of England, you're trapped by the Motorway Service Stations which suck you in with their promises of fine food and comfort away from the rain, jams and White Van Man. Once you're inside you find overpriced and frankly not very nice food, but you're grateful for the toilet, a cup of tea, a browse at the magazines and a quick break from the car. Then you're back to it.
But if you're not on the motorway, the world is your oyster as far as refreshment is concerned. If you're the obsessive, gourmet, organized type, you can plan your route and turn it into a mini gastro-tour. There's the new breed of pub which prides itself on good quality local produce, simply and well cooked or if you're near a town, it might be market day and you'll be spoiled for choice from the bread, cheese, vegetables and cooked goodies of offer. There are numerous books and websites to help you plan such a journey.
If you don't fall into either the obsessive, gourmet or organized camps and are travelling on the A roads and don't want to stray from your route, then you get the Roadside Cafe. The Roadside Cafe is most commonly a caravan style trailer with a pop up or sliding hatch, but can be an old bus, coach, little brick or wooden structures and I've even seen an ambulance which much to my dismay I couldn't photograph and once we'd zoomed past it I didn't feel that I could ask the driver to make the round trip to go past it again!
The food offered is broadly the same all over the country, cups of tea and instant coffee usually served in plastic or polystyrene cups - or mugs if you're lucky, there's usually Kit Kats and Mars Bars and other chocolaty treats but the starring role on the menu is reserved for the bacon, burger or sausage sandwich/bap/barm/bread cake/roll (you get to learn some local language too if you cover larger distances) with various extras, sometimes you'll be lucky to see local sausages and bacon on offer with free range local eggs. Sometimes you'll get a free Quality Street chocolate or two and usually a cheery word about the state of the traffic or the weather and a pointer in the right direction if lost.
I realised one day that I was missing a great opportunity for a photographic project almost every time I was out and about on a particular type of road so I got myself organized with a sheet of questions, model release forms, a fist full of business cards, a (hopefully) winning smile and an appetite for plenty of cups of tea. The vast majority of cafe owners have been very kind and taken time to chat, pose and smile for me and I'm grateful to each of them. Their vans are sometimes are nightmare to photograph as they are often very bright white and shiny on the outside and dark and shadowy on the inside, sometimes there isn't room to fit it all in even with my widest lens and my bottom perched perilously near the barbed wire or nettles on the boundary fence at the edge of the lay-by, sometimes it's just too dangerous if the front of the van points into the road and sometimes the owners are just camera shy and just say "no". Sometimes I'm lucky and the cafe is closed for the night (usually after 5pm) which means I can just take the picture nice and quickly without the chat, or sometimes it's lucky for me, unlucky for the cafe if they're boarded up for good.
I'm about to start take to the road again and am polishing my wide lens, searching out my list of questions and preparing to drink tepid, weak tea all in the name of a photo story!
7 responses
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Simon Kossoff said (9 Jun 2009):
excellent! you got my vote!
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Kevin House gave props (9 Jun 2009):
Great series. I love road food too.
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Sarah Franklin said (9 Jun 2009):
Thanks for the comments and props!
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Rey mos gave props (9 Jun 2009):
i like the story...
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Martin E. Morris gave props (10 Jun 2009):
Since the demise of the transport cafe,these have become the culinary lifesaver of the common man.An excellent series of images and great story which should really be expanded into a book.Voted!!!
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Kate Blood gave props (10 Jun 2009):
Wonderful!
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Hayley Faulkner gave props (10 Jun 2009):
Great story!
