Preservation bid for innovative 1950s motorway cafe

The Highways Agency is taking a fresh look at plans for a motorway junction that would flatten Britain's only architecturally important Little Chef.

It is to reconsider the alignment of a flyover for the A1 at Markham Moor in Nottinghamshire, a muddle of shops and filling stations in which the cafe perches like a graceful concrete and aluminium butterfly.

Designed as a petrol station in the late 1950s, it was converted 15 years ago by by Little Chef, which gets constant inquiries about its curious design.

Counter staff keep copies of the obituary of the architect, Sam Scorer, an innovator with roof structures, who died aged 80 last March.

The Little Chef is one of the neatest of his solutions to the challenge of a shape known as a hyperbolic paraboloid or hypar, a mixture of cones and curves which became a practical possibility thanks to 20th-century building materials.

When English Heritage listed Scorer's much larger Lincoln county library, built as a car showroom in 1959, the then arts minister Alan Howarth described him as "a pioneer in the use of this type of roof construction and a figure of national significance".

The Markham Moor cafe is as yet unlisted, but has an army of fans. The Rev Stephen Hoy, whose St John the Baptist church in Lincoln is another listed hypar design by Scorer, said: "The Little Chef is so distinctive - many people who have spoken to me about how it became a real staging point in a journey.

"Our archdeacon... reinforced this by describing how, as a child, he always used it as an indicator that the journey from Sheffield to Lincoln was half complete. It's good to hear the Highways Agency are giving it some thought."

The building is in the path of a slip road, part of a flyover and roundabouts at the bottleneck where the A57 meets the Great North Road. Work could start next year. A spokeswoman for the agency said: "No final decision has been made... One issue being considered is the possibility of an alternative route for the slip road to avoid demolishing the building."

Little Chef's other place in architecture is in the US, where it was the simplest model of the "Depression diner", a cabin cafe which could be carried on a lorry and set up as a roadside business serving the Valentine Lunch System. This was early fast food, invented, like the Little Chef, by Arthur Valentine of Wichita, Kansas.