I planned a 45 at Charnock Richard last March, rolled in at 18:55, and got the very last truck slot by about thirty seconds. The driver behind me had to push on to Knutsford and ended up sleeping at the back of an industrial estate near Northwich. I felt bad. Not bad enough to give him my space, but bad.
This is the league table I actually use. It is built from about four years of running the M6 north and south, mostly between the Scottish border and Birmingham, mostly on agency work where the planner does not care where I park as long as my tacho says I am legal in the morning. If you only do the M6 twice a year, ignore me. If you live on it, this might save you a Tuesday.
The 19:00 rule before we start
Anything I say below is wrong if you arrive after seven in the evening. By then every northbound stop south of Carlisle is full, and most of the southbound ones too. The HGV bays at Tebay are gone by half six in summer. Keele goes around quarter to seven. If you are planning a 45 anywhere on the M6, get parked by 18:30 or have a backup. I have a list of three industrial estates I will quietly use as plan B and I am not telling you where they are because if everyone uses them they get fenced off.
I plan most of my stops on ShiftOwt now, which has saved me a couple of bad nights because I can see the shape of the week before I commit to a long pull.
Tebay (northbound and southbound)
Everyone tells you Tebay is the best service station in the UK and they are mostly right. The food is genuinely good. The breakfast is £9.50 last time I bought it and the bacon is the kind of bacon that costs £9.50. The showers are clean. The bins do not stink in August.
The problem with Tebay is that everyone knows about Tebay. The HGV section is small relative to how famous the place is, and the cars wander into truck bays after dark because the signage is unclear and nobody enforces it. I have done two 45s there in the past year. Both were fine. Both required me to be parked by 17:30, which means leaving Glasgow basically at lunch.
Verdict: worth it if you can plan around the timing. If you cannot, do not waste your morning trying.
Charnock Richard (southbound mainly)
This is the one I rate highest for actual usefulness. Not the food. The food is what it is, a Welcome Break with the Burger King and the slightly tired Costa. The truck parking is the point. There is more of it than people expect and it does not fill until later than Tebay because the influencers have not got hold of it. If you are coming south past Preston between five and six, this is the one I would aim for.
The shower block is in the back of the building and the queue moves. £4 last time. I always pay for it because the alternative is going home smelling like the cab.
One annoying thing: if you park in the rear bays, the noise from the M6 itself is bad. Take the front rows if you can. They sound worse on paper but the wind direction breaks the engine noise up.
Keele (both sides)
Keele is fine. That is the whole review. Keele is fine.
The food is mid. The parking is decent in volume but the layout is awkward and you will reverse twice on the way out. The shower is okay. The shop has the basics. I have done maybe twenty 45s at Keele and I cannot remember a single specific thing about any of them, which honestly is the highest compliment you can pay a service station. Nothing went wrong. I slept. I left.
If you want a stop that is reliably available because nobody is desperate to park there, Keele is your friend.
Hartshead Moor (M62, technically not M6 but I am including it)
I know, the post is M6. But if you are coming off the M6 onto the M62 to head east, Hartshead Moor is where you end up and it deserves a mention because it is consistently underrated.
The truck parking is large. The food is average. The showers are okay if a bit dated. The thing nobody tells you is that the back HGV section is reasonably quiet at night because it is set away from the main building and the cars stay near the front. I slept properly there twice last winter. That almost never happens at a service station for me.
Stafford (north and south)
Stafford has a reputation that does not match what I have actually experienced. Drivers complain about it endlessly. I find Stafford fine. The northbound side is bigger than people give it credit for and the food is no worse than Keele.
The one thing I will say: do not take the bay closest to the entrance road. The trucks that arrive after 21:00 have their reverse beepers on and you will hear every single one until midnight. Take a bay further into the parking and you will be okay.
Knutsford
Hard pass for a 45. It is fine for a 15 minute break and a coffee, the McDonalds is open late, the toilets are clean. As a sleep stop it does not work. The parking area is too close to the slip roads and the night noise is brutal. I have ended up there twice when everywhere else was full and I would rather have driven to Stafford and risked a fine.
Lancaster (Forton tower)
The tower is a listed building and it is genuinely strange to look at. The truck parking is decent and the showers are clean. Food is the standard motorway pick-and-mix.
What stops me using it more is location. If I am coming south from Glasgow I have either stopped at Tebay already or I am pushing on to Charnock Richard, and Lancaster sits awkwardly between the two. If you are doing a Newcastle to Manchester run via the A66 and the M6, it works much better.
Sandbach (south of Knutsford)
Sandbach is the secret one. I am annoyed even writing this because I do not want it to fill up. The HGV parking is bigger than Knutsford and quieter and the food is no worse. The Roadchef there is one of the few that does a half-decent breakfast. £8.20 last I checked.
If you are heading down the M6 in the late afternoon and Charnock Richard is going to be tight, drop down to Sandbach instead. It is twenty minutes further on but you will sleep better.
How I plan a week now
I used to leave it to chance. I would set off Monday morning and figure out my 45 on the day. Sometimes that worked. More often I ended up at the third-best option for the night because I had not thought about it.
What changed was treating the week as a shape rather than a string of jobs. I block out where my 45 has to land and work the loads around it. My calendar shows which days are work, which are rest, where the 144-hour clock is, and whether the next weekly rest needs to be a full 45 or a reduced 24. That is most of the planning. Picking which truck stop is the easy part once the dates are fixed.
If you are an agency planner reading this, the same calendar lets you find drivers who are actually free on a given night, instead of the WhatsApp "who is around tomorrow" routine. Worth a look at the agency side if you have not.
What I would actually pay for
I would pay £15 a night for guaranteed parking. I would not pay £4 for a shower if the parking was free. I think most drivers I know would say something similar. The current pricing model has it the wrong way round.
Until that changes, the trick is what it has always been: get parked early, know your backups, and do not trust the satnav estimate of when you will arrive on a Friday afternoon in July.
Frequently asked things
Is Tebay really worth the hype?
Honestly, the food is better than any other UK service station I have eaten at. The hype is justified for the food. The hype is not justified for sleeping there because the parking fills too fast. So: yes for breakfast on the way through, less so as a planned 45.
What time should I aim to be parked by?
Six thirty in the evening if you want a choice of stops. Seven if you are willing to take whatever is left. After seven you are gambling, and in summer between June and August you should add an hour to all of those.
What about overnight HGV parks that are not service stations?
I use one near Crewe, one near Carlisle, and one south of Birmingham. They cost £15 to £18 a night. They are quieter than service stations and the showers are better. The trade-off is that you have to leave the motorway and you lose twenty minutes either side. On a 45 that is fine. On a 24 hour reduced rest it is annoying.
What if I get there and it is full?
You drive on. You do not park on the slip road. You do not park in a layby unless it has the proper HGV signage. The tacho will forgive you a small overrun if you can show you were genuinely looking for a legal spot, but the DVSA examiner I had two years ago made it clear that the tolerance is not infinite. Plan a backup before you set off, not at 19:30 when you are already in trouble.