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A famous and ideal Little Chef that is gone but not forgotten! |
A famous and ideal Little Chef that is gone but not forgotten! |
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Revision as of 16:26, 12 June 2014
The Peartree branch was a former Little Chef restaurant located at the junction of the A34/A44/A40 near Oxford, Oxfordshire.
The site was first built in the 1960s by the Forte group as a proper service area under their own brand, Autogrill. This was essentially a scaled down version of their Fortes motorway service station sites, designed for the A-roads, with the Barnsdale Bar site opening a little earlier than Peartree with the exact same building style (If you look at both from above they have the exact same orange roof). The site could be accessed by three busy roads meaning that the restaurant had a high chance of receiving a lot of customers travelling on different roads. The site was also paired up with a motel known as the "Excelsior Motel" (which later changed to Welcome Lodge in the 1990s) and one of Forte's "Granary Restaurants" which had something of a celebrity in terms of the restaurant as it was the first Granary Restaurant to open. The Granary Restaurant also had the addition of a carvery at some point. All in all, one of Forte's successful sites with a good range of facilities.
In 1996, Forte passed the ownership to Granada. In this era, Granada were forced to sell Welcome Break sites and rebrand it. Peartree luckily escaped the sale and continued as Welcome Break under Granada's ownership. At the time, Granada thought that it would be better to replace the Granary Restaurant with a more profitable Little Chef restaurant as it was more popular than the Granary Restaurant. The Little Chef opened as a Little Chef and Burger King combination with a filling station and a hotel known as the Oxford Lodge. A small area in the building was a gaming area.
When Compass took over Granada, they decided to close the elderly Oxford Lodge as there were plans to replace it with two new hotels. The two hotels are now Holiday Inn and a small, typical Travelodge hotel. When The People's Restaurant Group took over, they replaced the gaming area with a Coffee Tempo! outlet. Sadly, it didn't last for long.
In 2009, the Little Chef, Coffee Tempo! and Burger King all ceased trading in the building. Shortly after, Welcome Break saw that the building looked run down and decided to go through a refurbishment scheme to transform the old building into a more modern site, acting as a proper Welcome Break service building. This was completed in 2010 and has since given Peartree a modern look.
A famous and ideal Little Chef that is gone but not forgotten!