A 50^th anniversary passed by almost unnoticed last week. For many of us, what the anniversary commemmorates is something we give precious little thought to – but which we also use every day of our lives almost. The humble Preston by-pass – now the M6 – was 50 last week. Opened with pomp and circumstance by Harold Macmillan (all the best things originate with Tories), he travelled along it in a grand convoy, alighting once or twice to inspect the road surface. Not something I recommend you do in the fast lane now.

Nostalgics can find the booklet from the opening here.

It’s grown down the years too – from 2 lanes to 4. It’s a bit busier. And unsurprisingly, it took less than 2 months for the roadworks to appear. But no-one makes special detours to drive along it as they did in 1958. In the absence of speed limits on the road until 1965, it even became an impromptu test-track.

And just a few miles north of the by-pass, one of my favourite buildings in the whole world would open seven years later in 1965. A friend of mine has a caravan up in the Lakes to which I sometimes escape when I need a break from the politicking. He looks at me bemused as the nearer we get to this building, the more I start to bounce up-and-down in my seat like an excited two-year-old. Just like I did as a real two-year-old when a service station neared.

Forton Services may not be a concept to thrill the senses, but it excites me. The mushroom-shaped, UFO-like Pennine Tower at its centrepiece still looms like something out of a sci-fi series, daring one to enter, only you cannot as it is now shut. Unusable thanks to health and safety regulations. What was a revered culinary destination at one point has now become yet another forlorn reminder of an era when man (and woman) could be impressed by something that nowadays is workaday.  The Burger King on the overhead bridge is almost a slap in the face compared to the waitress-service, chicken-in-a-basket, prawn-cocktail delights that once awaited cheery customers who had travelled from as far as Blackpool for the experience. And no, the restaurant never revolved. Urban myth.

The website Motorway Services Trivia has a glorious black-and-white postcard of the restaurant in the 1970s.

Why get misty-eyed? Because in the week we have also seen congestion charging comprehensively routed, it is worth casting our minds back to the era when motoring was a luxury that comparatively few could afford. Now it is a necessity, the absence of which is ‘social exclusion’ in the eyes of many. The Preston by-pass was a brief, shining moment when future potential had the power to excite. Harold Wilson later called it the ‘white heat’ of the technological revolution.

Britain in the fifties and sixties was still a nation able to trade off our wartime record of innovation. Many of the iconic images of the period – nuclear power station white domes or Concorde say – are scientific. My own father worked as an engineer for the nuclear research industry for four decades, finishing at Daresbury Laboratory whose NSF Tower is almost a powerful landmark for those on the M56 as Forton is for M6 voyagers. Science has always offered a tantalising glimpse of what may one day be possible, an escape from workaday reality.

In a year when that other iconic structure Jodrell Bank has come close to closing, I think it does no harm to commemmorate the sense of possibility that the Preston by-pass represented. A static car park on a Bank Holiday weekend probably wasn’t in the plan. But at least they could sit atop the Pennine Tower and eat their sherry trifle.

It makes the M55 seem almost dull …