Commercial buildings change use all the time  – and most of the time we don’t bat an eyelid.  Simpsons Department Store on Piccadilly became Waterstone’s, pubs have turned into Tescos, and up and down the country wayside filling stations have become hand car washes rather than somewhere that you can actually buy fuel (except in the Fens, where they seem to be being made over as Chinese restaurants at an increasing rate).

It takes something special to still really shake the jaded British public. JD Wetherspoon are well known for their policy of redeveloping interesting historic buildings as public houses – Bicester Post Office became the Penny Black, and the Imperial in Exeter has a justly famous victorian glass orangery that looks like it’s escaped from the Crystal Palace.  It also occasionally takes on the less architecturally impressive buildings, as anyone who’s visited the other Penny Black, a concrete faced former fabric shop in Kidderminster will (perhaps unhappily) confirm.

Now though, they’ve announced plans to open the first pub at a service station in Britain – at TVE’s very own Beaconsfield services, just off junction 2 of the M40.  With a licence to sell alcohol for consumption on the premises from 0800-0100, this is something that has caused consternation from road safety charities, and a general feeling of disbelief from vox popped motorists at the services themselves.

Is there really a problem though?  Wetherspoon supporters will point out that motorists pass thousands of pubs every day up and down Britain without feeling the need to call in and get dangerously over the limit before proceeding on their way; and cars on the motorway carry passengers on long journeys – and there’s nothing stopping them from having a drink with their meal.

Perhaps this is the reinvention of the motorway service station – when it first opened people genuinely treated Watford Gap services as a tourist destination in its own right, rather than the Dante like outer circle of hell that it subsequently became.  Service stations like Strensham on the M5 in the 1970s had full waiter service, linen, and decent food.  The brutalist architecture of the services on the original northern M6 may have gone out of fashion since the 1960s, but you can see what they were trying to do – create pleasant places to break your journey and watch the world go by. Wetherspoons will never compete with the mid market eateries that crowd every high street, but maybe, if this becomes the first of many, they could be part of the repositioning of the motorway services away from the greasy spoon, which began with the revolutionising arrival of M&S Simply Food and Waitrose in the 2000s.

On the other hand, a cynic will of course have noticed that Beaconsfield is the last services before London when you come down from the north west of England.  There are few decent pubs in Wembley, and Twickenham pubs are very expensive.  If you’re running a coach trip down to a big sports event then this could be your last stop before the stadium – motorway service station as vertical drinking establishment?  There’s a bookmakers at one of the  services on the M6, and on Saturdays that gets rammed when all the travelling sports fans pull in on their way to the match (as does McDonalds, Burker King, etc).  Maybe someone savvy at Wetherspoons has decided they’d like a piece of this captive market?

If the plans go ahead, we’ll soon find out.

As I stood at Paddington station yesterday, waiting for yet another horribly delayed First Great Western service, a commuter passing me stumbled and threw his cardboard cup of coffee out to one side.  As he swung out his arm to steady himself, he released the baguette he was also carrying, which fell to the floor to become fodder for the pigeons.

Watching this little drama unfolding, I reflected on how busy our lives have become in the 21st century – everyone’s rushing all oveer the place, grabbing their sustenance on the move from depressing chain vendors. It’s not food, it’s fuel – and not even necessarily very well suited to being even that.  But when you look around Paddington Station, you realise that it was put together by people who cared about what they were doing, and put thought into their design.  Brunel’s trainshed is proof that it’s not enough just to make something that’s good at doing it’s job when you could build something that looks good as well.  Of course, Bauhaus aficianados will tell you that letting form follow function is good design practice, but then there’s a reason that Bauhaus needs aficianados and exists outside the mainstream…..

Anyway, whilst I stared mindlessly into space, past the depressing realities of 21st century mass railtravel – plasticky carriages of “creatures that move in pre-destined grooves,” something caught my eye.  On platform 9, celebrating its 150th birthday, a locomotive built for the Festiniog Railway to haul slate through the North Wales valleys.  When it was built, no passenger service was envisaged for the line, so this locomotive was designed to be well out of the public eye.

Not exactly utilitarian is it?  When you compare it to the design of much of what we use in every day life today, it’s difficult not to feel that things are going backwards.

I’m not suggesting that contra Bauhaus function should follow form, as that’s clearly daft, but wouldn’t it be nice, where possible, if both could co-exist?

That, at least, seems to be the message from the founders of BrewDog, the “punk beer” brewer – now on a bit of a push for added sales – who seem to think that if you can’t match the ad spend of your competitors (especially if you’re not an industry leader), then, frankly, you shouldn’t be in the same advertising space.

In an eye-opening interview with Marketing Magazine (pushed wider by Brand Republic), the founders dismissed traditional advertising out of hand - “I would rather take my money and set fire to it,” and lashed out at Molson Coors’ female focused beer “Animee,”(“it managed to patronise women and bastardise the hell out of beer”) which lasted about a year in the UK:

“No soul, no integrity, no passion – just a complete corruption thought up by an idiot in the marketing department. It’s a microcosm of almost everything that’s bad about beer in the UK.”

So, how do BrewDog aim to raise awareness of their products?  Well, they’ve just announced a US TV show about craft beer (because editorial is “1000 times more worthwhile” than advertising), and, presumably, they’re going to give a few more interviews like this one……

However, you might ask how needling others in the industry will cut through to the people at the bar or in the off-licence who are actually going to by the product?  Well, BrewDog have form here as well – any takers for a 55% ABV bottle shoved into a dead hare?

The UK market is so diverse at the smaller brewer end, that it can be difficult to get noticed, but taxidermy is certainly an interesting move on from say Brains’ shirt sponsorship of London Welsh RFC  isn’t it….?

The Value Engineers’ parent company, Cello Group, announce the acquisition of Mash Health.

Mash will join Cello’s healthcare division, Cello Health, and will further complement Cello Health’s insight, advisory and evidence based capabilities in the ethical pharmaceutical area, with enhanced expertise in the consumer health area.  This is consistent with Cello Health’s aim of becoming a leading global health services company.

http://www.cellogroup.com/acquisition-of-mash-health/