Watch on The Great North Road

Market Place c1955
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My parents lived at Sprotborough and were great motorcycle and sidecar enthusiasts although by 1968, the Triumph Speed Twin and sidecar had given way to a Morris Minor, later to be replaced with a Triumph Herald.  On Friday or Saturday evenings their favourite outing would be to Bawtry.  Parking in the Market Place as in this photograph, they would simply sit and watch the huge variety of traffic passing on what, until the Doncaster by-pass A1(M) was constructed, was the Great North Road between London and Scotland. A pint at The Crown and fish and chips in newspaper then completed a perfect evening.

My wife and I stayed at The Crown in late 2006 and to the casual visitor, very little seems to have changed in the Market Place area.  Outside the town, the main railway line from Kings X to Edinburgh is now electrified and the roads are less busy because of the loss of through traffic.  The old railway station is long gone and the site is now a housing estate.  Further south, at Blyth, the transport cafe once run by my aunt Gertrude has disappeared from the face of the earth and slightly further south, at the A1(M) junction, a huge, souless ediface filled with metal and plastic tables (the motorway service area) has replaced it.