Heading back towards home following my visit to Preston Bus Station I had one further brutalist target in mind.
You don’t arrive at Forton Services so much as drift past it. Indeed, I didn’t just drift past it, I shot past it at 70miles per hour not realising I was approaching the services I wanted to stop at! My sat-nav had described this as Lancaster Services, I hadn’t realised that was what Forton Services was now called. Out in the third lane I had no option but to drive past, turn around at the next junction and drive back down the other carriage. This didn’t just mean added mileage to get to the building, but a lot more added mileage to turn around again when I left!
Like most drivers on the M6, I’d seen the tower dozens of times before I ever stopped. It hovers above the motorway with a kind of quiet authority—part control tower, part relic—visible just long enough to register, then gone again in the rhythm of traffic. It’s not designed to be admired at 70 miles per hour, but that’s exactly how most people experience it: as a brief interruption in the journey north or south.
Pulling off the motorway changes everything.
Suddenly, the building is no longer a passing object but a place—awkward, sprawling, and strangely disjointed. The low service buildings feel incidental, adapted over time, but the tower still dominates. It doesn’t belong to what surrounds it anymore. If anything, the rest of the site feels like it has grown around it, gradually forgetting what the tower was meant to be.
From a distance, it reads as pure geometry: a hexagon suspended in the air, supported by a single concrete stem. But as you get closer—camera in hand—the surface begins to tell a different story.
The first photograph almost takes itself. You take this shot through a window which gives reflections of the square lighting behind you. When I first saw this I thought it added to the futuristic look of the tower, but on reflection it was more a distraction so this was lost in the edit.
Standing back, the composition is dictated by the long pedestrian bridge that cuts across the frame, pulling the eye toward the tower. The motorway runs beneath it in a blur—cars reduced to streaks of motion—while the structure itself remains stubbornly still. There’s a tension there: speed versus permanence. The whole site was built for movement, yet the tower now feels completely static, as if it has been left behind by the very system it was designed to serve.
It’s only when you move underneath that the building reveals its weight.
Looking up, the second image becomes something else entirely. The tower loses its elegance and gains mass. The underside is all raw concrete panels, stained and weathered, each section radiating outward like a fixed point of pressure. The geometry is still precise, but it feels heavier now—less like something futuristic and more like something enduring. The kind of structure that wasn’t built to be replaced, only to outlast.
There’s no attempt to hide the material. This is Brutalism at its most honest: concrete exposed, structure expressed, function made visible. And yet the function itself has disappeared.
The final image brings you face to face with that absence.
Up close, the tower begins to show its age in ways that the distant view conceals. The railings are weathered, the paint uneven, the edges softened by time and neglect. The windows—once framing expansive views across the landscape—now feel sealed off, disconnected from the world below. Even the addition of modern telecommunications equipment on the roof feels less like adaptation and more like quiet occupation.
It’s hard not to imagine what this space once was.
Opened in 1965 during the great expansion of Britain’s motorway network, Forton Services embodied a new kind of travel experience—one shaped by speed, mobility, and modernity. Designed by architects at T. P. Bennett & Son, the site was part of an ambitious vision to elevate motorway services beyond fuel and function.
At its heart stood the now-iconic Pennine Tower: a hexagonal, Brutalist structure inspired by air traffic control towers and the aesthetics of the Space Age. Elevated above the northbound carriageway, it originally housed an upscale restaurant and sun deck, offering panoramic views across Morecambe Bay and the surrounding countryside.
This was not just a place to refuel—it was a destination. In an era when motorway travel still carried a sense of novelty, diners would ascend into the sky to eat lobster, steak, and regional specialities, framed by vast horizons.
Forton was designed to impress. It reflected a moment when infrastructure was aspirational—when even a service station could feel glamorous.
Architecturally, Forton Services sits firmly within the Brutalist tradition: bold geometry, exposed concrete, and a sculptural presence that prioritises form as much as function.
The tower’s elevated dining room—cantilevered and visually detached—creates a sense of drama rare in roadside architecture. Below, low-slung service buildings and an enclosed pedestrian bridge stretch across the motorway, reinforcing the idea of a fully integrated, self-contained travel environment.
For photographers and architecture enthusiasts, the site offers something unusual: a piece of infrastructure that behaves like a monument. It is both utilitarian and theatrical—equally at home in a transport network or a science-fiction film.
Yet the ambition that defined Forton Services was also short-lived.
By the late 20th century, changing expectations—and stricter safety regulations—began to undermine the viability of the tower restaurant. In 1989, the Pennine Tower was closed to the public, primarily due to fire safety concerns, including the lack of a secondary escape route.
From that moment on, the building entered a slow and visible decline.
The restaurant fell silent. The panoramic dining room—once filled with travellers—became inaccessible, later used only for storage or occasional staff training. The broader service station evolved in more pragmatic ways: extensions, rebrands, retail units, and forecourt upgrades replaced the original sense of architectural cohesion.
Meanwhile, the tower remained—too iconic to demolish, too impractical to reuse.
In 2012, the Pennine Tower was granted Grade II listed status, recognising its cultural and architectural significance. It stands today as a protected relic of a time when even motorway services were designed with imagination and ambition.
But preservation has not meant restoration.
The tower still looms over the M6—repainted, maintained at a basic level, yet fundamentally dormant. To passing drivers, it is a curiosity. To those who stop and look closer, it feels more like a monument to a lost idea: that infrastructure could inspire, that travel could be theatrical, and that even a roadside meal could come with a view worth remembering.
There’s something undeniably compelling about Forton Services today—particularly for those drawn to Brutalism’s more melancholic side.
The Pennine Tower exists in a kind of architectural limbo: neither abandoned nor alive, preserved but inaccessible. Its silhouette still commands attention, but its purpose has faded. It is a building that once looked forward—and now stands still.
For photographers, it offers rich territory: stark geometry, weathered concrete, and a narrative embedded in every surface. For everyone else, it’s a fleeting glimpse from the motorway—a reminder that even the most ambitious visions can quietly slip into obsolescence.
When Pennine Tower opened in the 1960s, it wasn’t just an architectural gesture—it was an experience. A restaurant in the sky, above the motorway, offering travellers something aspirational in the middle of a journey. You didn’t just stop—you ascended. You paused, looked out, and became briefly aware of the landscape you were moving through.
Now, that experience exists only in the structure itself.
The tower hasn’t been ruined or abandoned outright—it’s something more subtle than that. It has been left behind. Preserved, technically. Maintained, just enough. But functionally absent. It no longer participates in the life of the motorway, even as it stands directly above it.
Photographing it feels less like documenting a building and more like recording a shift in time.
There’s a particular kind of melancholy to places like this—not dramatic decay, but quiet redundancy. The architecture still insists on being seen. The forms are still striking, the composition still deliberate. But the purpose has slipped away, leaving behind something that feels both significant and strangely hollow.
Driving away, the tower returns to what it was before: a fleeting presence, glimpsed from the corner of your eye. But after standing beneath it, photographing it, tracing its surfaces with a lens, it’s impossible to see it in quite the same way again.
It’s no longer just a structure on the motorway.
It’s a reminder of a moment when even a service station believed in the future—and built for it.
