Service Station Index

Acquiring a car finance deal isn’t exclusive to recreational use. It’s equally important for those who work for themselves to be able to secure a self-employed car finance arrangement. It allows you to expand your customer reach and travel around the country for work. Therefore, having a good service station on your route to refuel your car and yourself is paramount, especially for those longer journeys.

We’ve looked into the data to find the best-ranked service stations across the UK. We’ve considered several factors, including parking spaces, restaurants, shops, EV chargers, EV charger prices, petrol and diesel prices, and Tripadvisor reviews, scoring them out of 10 to reveal the UK’s best service stations.

The best service stations in the UK

1. Hopwood Park, service station score: 7.58/10

Hopwood Park, just south of Birmingham on the M42, takes the top spot, with a service station score of 7.58 out of 10. Hopwood Park has 460 parking spaces and 46 electric vehicle chargers, all of which are rapid chargers with a capacity of at least 25kW.

The average price for electric vehicle chargers is £0.52 per kWh, and petrol and diesel cost 140.2p and 148.26p per litre, respectively. Hopwood Park also has 13 eateries, with Burger King, Chopstix Noodle Bar, and KFC among them.

2. Woodall (Southbound), service station score: 6.79/10

Sheffield’s Woodall’s southbound service station ranks second, scoring 6.79 out of 10. Woodall has 18 rapid chargers for electric vehicles. The average price for petrol and diesel cars is 139.4p and 148.07p per litre, respectively.

Woodall also has 12 eateries, including Burger King, KFC, and Chopstix Noodle Bar. This Yorkshire-based service station sits between junctions 30 and 31 and is open 24 hours, with free shower facilities and a pet-friendly outdoor area.

3. Birchanger Green, service station score: 6.78/10

Our top three is completed by Birchanger Green, with a service station score of 6.78 out of 10. This Essex service station is located near Stanstead Airport, on junction 8 of the M11. It also has shower and laundry facilities.

Birchanger Green has 340 parking spaces, 12 eateries, and 3 shops. It’s also a great place to charge your electric vehicle, with 34 rapid chargers and an average electric charger price of 57p per kWh.

The service station with the most parking spaces

Cobham, car parking spaces: 716

Cobham recorded the highest number of parking spaces compared to any other service station in the UK, with 716.

Leeds Skelton Lake had 550, the second-highest parking spaces in the UK, followed by Beaconsfield and South Mimms, who shared the third spot with 540 parking spaces.

The service station with the most eateries

Beaconsfield, number of eateries: 16

The service station with the most eateries is Beaconsfield, with 16 in total. McDonald’s, KFC, Nando’s, J D Wetherspoon (The Hope & Champion), and Pizza Express are among the 16 options at Beaconsfield.

Fleet (Southbound) and Cobham take second and third place, with 15 and 14 eateries, respectively.

The service station with the most shops

Gloucester (Southbound), number of shops: 7

Gloucester’s southbound service station has the most shops, with 7 in total. It has a farm shop, butcher’s counter, cheese counter, deli counter, gelato counter, and a patisserie. It also has a virtual fishmonger on the southbound service station. Most food and goods are made locally as part of a partnership between Westmorland, the owners, and the charity Gloucestershire Gateway Trust.

The service station with the most rapid chargers

Exeter, number of rapid chargers: 56

With 56 rapid chargers, the Exeter service station takes the top spot. Located on the M5 at junction 30, the Exeter service station has 2 charging stations. One is a Tesla-only charging station with 32 charging devices, all with a maximum power capacity of 250kW. The other charging station, powered by GRIDSERVE Electric Highway, has 24 rapid devices and 36 connectors.

The service station with the most charging devices

Exeter, number of charging devices: 58

Exeter service station takes the top spot, with 58 charging devices in total. In addition to the 56 rapid charging devices, the charging station powered by GRIDSERVE Electric Highway also has 2 fast chargers, each with a maximum power capacity of 11kW. These are cheaper than the rapid charging stations, costing 49p/kWh, compared to the 79p/kWh rapid charging device costs.

The service station with the cheapest average electric charger price

Oxford/Gordano, average electric charger price: 49p/kWh

Service stations Oxford and Gordano share the top spot, with the average price of an EV charging device costing 49p/kWh. The price of charging your electric vehicle in both service stations ranges from 45p/kWh to 79p/kWh, with most charging points being Tesla-only.

The region with the lowest average petrol price

Wales, average petrol price: 139.36p per litre

The region with the cheapest average petrol price is Wales, which costs 139.36p per litre on average. This is from Magor services, located at junction 23A M4, Wales’s largest and busiest service station.

The region with the lowest average diesel price

North West, average diesel price: 147.81p per litre

The North West has the cheapest diesel, costing 147.81p per litre on average. The 8 service stations with the lowest average diesel price are Burtonwood, Charnock Richard, Tebay, Birch, Southwaite, Chester, Lymm Truckstop, and Killington Lake, and you can find them on the M6, M62, and M56.

The best-reviewed service station

Gloucester (Southbound), Tripadvisor review score: 4/5

We looked into service stations’ Tripadvisor pages with a minimum of 100 reviews and found that Gloucester’s southbound service station is the best-rated service station, scoring 4/5 on Tripadvisor. More than 3,500 people have reviewed Gloucester Services, with reviewers praising its cleanliness, quality of food, and customer service.

Methodology

The data used in our study is accurate as of May 2024.

We used Motorway Services to find every service station in the UK, and the number of eateries and shops in each service station.

We then used Parkopedia to find the number of parking spaces for each service station. We used the top 50 service stations with the most parking spaces in our seeding list. Where there were 2 service stations (for example, northbound and southbound), we took the service station with the most parking for our seeding list. Data was sourced on May 14th, 2024.

We used ZapMap to find the number of fast, rapid, and slow charging devices in each service station. This included Tesla-only charging devices. We used ZapMap’s key of rapid (greater than 25kW), fast (7kW to 22kW), and slow (3kW to 6kW) chargers to collect our data. Where a charging device had more than one power setting, we used the most powerful setting for our data. No charging devices were classed as slow. Data was sourced on May 15th, 2024.

We also used ZapMap to find the average cost of each charging point. We combined the price of each charging device and divided it by the number of charging devices. Where the cost varied at different times of day, we took the most expensive price for our data to find the average cost. Data was sourced on May 15th, 2024.

We used the RAC to find each UK region’s average petrol and diesel price (pence per litre). We matched the service station to the region to give each station an average cost of petrol and diesel. As no Northern Ireland service station was part of our seeding list, we didn’t include data for this region. Data was sourced on May 15th, 2024.

We used Tripadvisor to find each service station’s rating out of 5 stars. Tripadvisor data was unavailable for Donington, Pease Pottage, Rownhams (South-westbound), Chieveley, Stafford (Southbound), and Ferrybridge. Whilst there was a Tripadvisor page for Burtonwood and Annandale Water, no reviews had been left at the time of data collection, and therefore data wasn’t included in this factor. For some service stations with 2 opposite each other (for example, northbound and southbound), we had to take Tripadvisor data from the opposite service station as this was the only page available. These stations were Toddington, Clacket Lane, Leigh Delamere, Strensham, Taunton Deane, and Southwaite. Only Tripadvisor pages with a minimum of 100 reviews were included in the data. Anything below this threshold was removed from the data.

Finally, we put our factors (parking spaces, eateries, shops, rapid chargers, total chargers, EV charger price, petrol price, diesel price, review score) into a weighted table, giving each factor a normalised score out of 10. We then averaged these scores to get our overall service station score out of 10.