About Off The Junction

What this site is

Off The Junction is an independent project built using open data, real journeys and first-hand visits. It exists to answer one question: what is actually near this junction?

Fuel, food, EV charging, supermarkets, pubs and hotels — mapped junction by junction, so you can decide where to stop before you get there instead of gambling on the next blue sign.

Why it exists

Motorway service areas are not the only option at most junctions, and they are rarely the cheapest. A few minutes off the carriageway there is often a supermarket, a retail park or an ordinary high street with the same facilities at ordinary prices.

That information already exists, but it is scattered across a dozen places and none of them are organised around the thing you actually care about at 70mph: the next junction. This site pulls it into one place, one junction at a time.

How every guide is built

Each junction page is assembled the same way:

• Locate the junction. Every junction has a fixed set of coordinates, taken from open mapping data.
• Find what is nearby. Amenities within easy reach of the junction are pulled from OpenStreetMap and sorted into categories — fuel, food and drink, EV charging, shops, accommodation and the rest.
• Measure the detour. Distances are calculated from the junction itself, not from the town centre, so the number reflects how far you would actually be driving off your route.
• Check it by hand. Open data is generous but untidy. Listings are reviewed and corrected manually, and anything that turns out to be closed, duplicated or mis-categorised is removed.

Service area write-ups are based on first-hand visits rather than press material. Where something has not been visited yet, the page says so rather than inventing an opinion.

Where the data comes from

• Amenity and location data — OpenStreetMap, made available under the Open Database Licence.
• Fuel prices — the UK Government's Fuel Finder scheme. This is not live on the site yet; it is the next planned addition.
• Service area reviews — first-hand visits.

Who runs it

The site is free to read and carries advertising to cover its running costs. Advertising never determines which places appear on a junction page or the order they appear in — the listings come from the data and the checks described above, and nobody can pay to be added to them.

Corrections and suggestions

Junction data changes. Places close, chains rebrand, and open data occasionally puts a petrol station in a field. If something on the site is wrong, or a junction you know well is missing something obvious, please get in touch — corrections from people who actually use these junctions are the fastest way to make the site better.