Mike Priestley's Railway Heritage Blog: The Station Buffet Part Five

The major players that provide familiar trade names at stations all over the country today include the chains like Upper Crust, Pumpkin Cafes, Café Ritazza, Marks and Spencer Food, Starbucks and Costa, which is part of the Whitbread group. Together, the chains dominate catering provision on Britain’s railway stations. SSP owns or franchises most of the brands on its station sites in Britain. Another branch of SSP, Rail Gourmet, provides on-board trolley catering to rail operators.

Neil Frizzell, in his 2014 article for the Vice UK website, counted 115 Pumpkin cafes on our stations, suggesting that they are universally predictable and bland. “Britain's Pumpkin Cafes are the liminal, transitionary stop gaps that everybody has been to but nobody thinks they know. None of us asked for it, but it is what we all deserve.” The article suggests that they are at the same time class-less and a great social leveller. A Resolver News blog in 2015, The Myth of Restaurant Competition? also highlighted the corporate domination of the scene. Pumpkin outlets had grown to 126 by 2023.

Network Rail owns 20 of Britain’s biggest and busiest railway stations, including 11 in London. Many of these have multiple cafes, restaurants and retail areas on the same site. Other, generally smaller railway stations and their facilities are run by the Train Operating Companies. They lease and manage their stations from Network Rail, and a number of independent railway cafes still survive there.

The internet reveals many examples of cafes, both within and outside of the chains, that have come and gone over the last few years. Brexit, Covid, the war in Ukraine, the subsequent energy crisis, high inflation, slow economic growth, industrial unrest on the railways in 2022 and 2023 and increasing food prices are all likely to have affected the situation. One of the results of this period of turmoil has been fewer passengers travelling by train, with overall passenger numbers not yet recovering to pre-Covid levels. This means less footfall on station platforms and fewer potential customers for refreshment rooms, leading to greater financial pressure on the providers.

For the surviving successful smaller operators and independents, establishing a reputation for being just that is likely to be their most important characteristic. As with food and drink outlets elsewhere, current tenure is no guarantee of permanence. Reputations that have been painstakingly built up over time can quickly be lost with a few changes of personnel. Consequently, any description of the railway buffet scene is a fleeting picture of a moment in time. By the time you get there, there may be nothing to write home about.

Writing in the Guardian in 2009, Dixe Wills recommended cafes at Kyle of Lochalsh, Woodbridge, Grindleford, St Erth, Manningtree, Wymondham, Carnforth, Huddersfield (with two - the Station Buffet on platform four and the Head of Steam bar and buffet on platform one), Barnstaple, Worksop, Bridlington, Corbridge, Crediton, Delamere, Dewsbury, Dingwall, Great Malvern, Haverfordwest, Hebden Bridge, Malton, Northwich, Spean Bridge, Sherborne, Skipton, Stalybridge, Westbury, Yeovil Junction and York.

Worcester signal box was acclaimed by Nell Frizzell, writing for Vice.com, in 2014. This was part of a trend that had already begun at Folkestone, Truro and Bodmin Parkway, where the Bodmin and Wenford Railway operates Bodmin Parkway Station buffet in the old signalbox above the down platform, under the Cornish Rail Coffee Company franchise, who also run the buffet at Liskeard station and one at Bodmin General. Former mechanical signalboxes will no doubt continue to provide more opportunities in the near future as they are rapidly discarded in favour of colour-light signalling controlled from a handful of modern centres.

In 2015 the Guardian contributed Glenfinnan to its international list, a theme continued in 2018, when the same newspaper added the Station Hotel, Hull, to its favourites. In 2019, Kate Andrews writing in the Mirror, flagged up station bars at Sheffield, London Liverpool Street, Corrour, Newcastle Central, York, London St Pancras and Codsall.

June 2021 saw the reopening of Gobowen station café, announced by the Community Rail Network, and the Hereford Times flagged up the opening of Leominster station café in October 2021. In July 2022, the Eastern Daily Press included Downham Market, Reepham, Whitwell, Aylsham, and Sheringham in its own list of recommendations. Oakhampton Station Café opened in September 2022 on the recently re-opened line to Exeter. Scotsrail’s own website promotes independent cafes at Haymarket, Glasgow Queen Street, Tweedmouth and Tain. An independent café at Yatton station is run by the local community and another at Sowerby Bridge is known as the Jubilee Refreshment Rooms. Dawlish station had an independent café last time I was there, as did Wakefield Kirkgate, except that it was unexpectedly shuttered at the time of our visit.

There are also many station cafes on the heritage railways, for example at Loughborough on the Great Central Railway, Highley on the Severn Valley Railway and Pickering on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, as well as cafes in former station buildings where trains no longer run, as at Bassenthwaite Lake.