The motorway service station is a place that most of us pass through, on the way to somewhere else. It’s an intersection point, a place where our lives briefly and randomly cross with the lives of others. Open 24 hours on every day of the year, people come and go at all times of the day or night. Most of the time we find ourselves amongst a crowd of strangers, though at the quietest times we can be almost alone. Our stay there is usually short, a break in a journey before moving on. It’s an interlude, a transient experience,  before heading off to the real destination.   

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Yet if we were to stop there and stay still amongst the endless flow of people, we would perhaps find ourselves mesmerised by what went on around us. As resident photographer at Gordano, I had the opportunity to do just this for the course of a whole year.

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What I soon discovered in this most unexpected of places was a window like no other onto contemporary British life. People of all ages, with different ways of being, travelling for diverse purposes converged there in ever-shifting patterns. It showed something of how we live now, while also presenting itself as a kind of ongoing drama made up of individual stories.

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In ‘Greetings from Gordano’, I have tried to capture some of these stories and to reflect the times in which we find ourselves. The photographs are grouped by the many activities that I observed: arriving, buying, waiting, leaving, and so on. These may be mundane in themselves, but together they paint a picture of our everyday life, showing how the extraordinary can so often reveal itself in the ordinary.

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I would like to thank Ellie Wilson and Matt Hampton at Welcome Break for making this project possible and for their continuing interest and support. I would also like to thank all the staff at Gordano for their help and kindness, whilst working so hard to keep the whole show on the road, day and night.