Peterborough Service Area exists as a passing place – a familiar and yet unfamiliar space where travellers stop on their way somewhere else. A pocket of noise and activity in acres of open countryside, it has operated twenty-four hours a day, every single day of every single year since its opening in 2001.
The service area is comprised of a range of familiar outlets: Shell, Costa Cofee, Deli2Go, Wafflemeister and a ubiquitous McDonalds. These bright, standardised spaces are built in the footprint of a settlement the history of which stretches back to Roman times.In the fields surrounding this knot of activity, wildlife abounds. Three crosses stand on a barrow. Crows nest in the branches of a long-dead oak. The rusting remains of signs are gathered in by weeds.
Surrounded on three sides by only mildly spoiled countryside and on the fourth by Peterborough, the service area is often advertised as a “gateway” to the city. It feels, at times, like the gateway to a hundred other places too. There is every chance that you have been here without ever even knowing it.
Residency Book
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“… takes Brian Glover’s fundamental misunderstanding of a place and turns it into a project that is very human, very engaging and very slightly otherworldly and unnerving…” – Will Vigar
“I wanted this pamphlet to be longer, and yet I found that it told me enough to make me think; next time I stop at a motorway service area I will look around me with more attention…” – Cath Barton
This A6, saddle-stitched booklet collects together the images, impressions and stories that make up Peterborough Service Area. It is the first in the Liminal Residency series. There will only ever be 200 numbered copies in existence, available at a flexible price of £5 or more. All proceeds are used to fund future residencies.
Participating Artists
Krishan Coupland is a graduate from the University of East Anglia MA Creative Writing programme. His debut chapbook When You Lived Inside The Walls is available from Stonewood Press, and his short fiction appears in Ambit, Aesthetica and Litro. He has won the Manchester Fiction Prize, and the Bare Fiction Prize. He runs and edits Neon Literary Magazine. He is unduly pre-occupied with theme parks. His website is www.krishancoupland.co.uk.
Eloise Shepherd is a writer and poet, with a surprisingly successful sideline in boxing. Her work features in New Writing 13, The Fiction Desk, and MIRonline. She recently spent a month in the Rockies as part of the Banff Centre Mountain and Wilderness Writing Programme. Like every twat she is working on a novel. Her website is http://www.eloiseccshepherd.co.uk