Leigh Delamere

The wikipedia entry for Leigh Delamere reads:

"Leigh Delamere services is a motorway service station on the M4 motorway situated one mile west of Junction 17, between Bristol and Swindon (close to Chippenham and Malmesbury). It takes its name from the adjoining village of Leigh Delamere. It is one of Europe's largest service stations."


Ho hum. It's perhaps one of the dullest service stations in the vicinity of one of the dullest areas of England - Swindon (apologies to any Swindonians reading).

But in Jasper Fforde's comic literary fantasy Thursday Next novels, the area around Swindon and the nearby M4 corridor, is one of the most vibrant and successful areas of the fictional UK.

A small passing joke in one of the novels is that lit detective Thursday Next agrees as part of a complex deal to get the President of the UK (President George Formby) to change the name of an M4 service station to the name of the grandmother of a villain's henchman she encounters.

The grandmother is of course called Leigh Delamere.

Thursday also, I think, almost passes over into the underworld by walking over the pedestrian bridge at this service station. The modern fictional Wiltshire equivalent of the River Styx and the gates to Hades.

So, when I got the chance to stop off there today on a journey to collect my son from Bristol I had to take the chance, and take the pic of the name.

It's not a great pic - it's ordinary and dull (indeed I've tried to make it as dull as possible). But that's the joke - to make it a suitable homage to Jasper Fforde's fictional Leigh Delamere.