'Abandoned UFO' on the M6 was a striking vision of the future

It's a familiar site to anyone who regularly drives on the M6, but for the uninitiated, one building's unusual design will have had some motorists doing a double-take. Forton Services, near Lancaster, was built to service users of the newly built 13.5 mile stretch of the M6 connecting the Lancaster bypass and Preston bypass in 1965.

READ MORE: Much-loved Manchester store had its own bus service - before customers started to avoid it 'like the plague'With the birth of Britain's motorway network in the late 1950s, the service station was one of the earliest. It was part of an ambitious vision of revolutionising travel across Britain for the growing number of car owners.

In an archive of the now offline Forton Services website, the memories of a former Pennine Tower's waitress, Noreen Blackburn, are recounted. Noreen remembered leaving school in 1966 and going to work in the service's separate cafeteria, filling shelves with sandwiches and cakes. "There was a full time uniform mistress who altered all the clothing for new staff as they arrived. The tower waitresses' uniforms were simply the best – as were the ladies who wore them – and I was so delighted when I donned that uniform and entered the lift to go up to the tower on my first day!"Despite the restaurants ambitions, it appears the food it was serving to diners wasn't quite hitting the mark.

It's entry on the Historic England website, states: "Forton demonstrated a new popularist architecture ideally suited to the democratic new aesthetic of the motorway, the Pennine Tower Restaurant acting both as a beacon to attract the passing motorists and as a glamorous vantage point from which they were able to enjoy spectacular prospects of the motorway below and more extensively over the miles of surrounding countryside through which they passing.

Despite being long abandoned, many have fond memories of the tower and admire its unusual architecture. On the SABRE roads forum people have shared their memories of the Pennine Tower.

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