Look Service Stations and Selwood Service Stations gift tokens, 1970s or early 1980s

Not the most exciting pieces of petroliana perhaps, except that these two gift tokens both represent early phases of James Frost's business which would later become Save Service Stations, eventually the largest non-oil-company-owned chain of petrol stations in the UK.

According to a 1991 Daily MIrror profile, in 1967 Frost, who was an accountant living in Buckinghamshire but working in the City of London, "became fed up with travelling into the City each day" and joined a local company running two petrol stations (possibly Selwood?) "in danger of going bankrupt" and turned the company around.

From this business, which expanded rapidly, he built Look Service Stations, based on Griffin Lane in Aylesbury, who I think mainly sold discounted VIP and then Elf petrol but with a distinctive purple and white branding on the canopy and other parts of the self-service forecourts. Look owned its sites freehold, using a model similar to Save later did, with commission operators buying in to the business and having control of any accompanying workshop/showroom and the shop (often, at this time, mainly for motoring accessories and spares rather than food and drink). Look did also run a company called Look Motoring Supplies. The sites were possibly not exclusively supplied by Elf, as a 1976 document available on Companies House shows Conoco (Jet) having a charge over Look for four sites in Fellowsfield Way, Kimberworth, Rotherham; Pershore Road, Kings Norton; Hucknall Road, Nottingham; and Abbey Road, Kirkstall, Leeds.

I only ever saw one Look site, in Pinhoe, Exeter, shortly before it rebranded to Save, in about 1986/7; the purple was distinctive enough for the 5-year-old me to try to draw the logo many times!

Look had 51 sites by 1980, with 0.7% of the UK petrol sales market, expanding from the south-east into the Midlands and north of England, mainly in urban areas, and were one of the few places to accept Green Shield stamps in exchange for gifts once Argos stopped, possibly the genesis of Save's later Blue Chip stamp scheme (e.g. see here www.flickr.com/photos/danlockton/51492894949). While the gift schemes may have been generous, Look was one of the first networks to install coin-operated air pumps, with Frost telling the Sunday Mirror in 1984 that they were better, since drives would at least know they would get accurate readings from new, well-maintained equipment.

It seems as though Look Petroleum (as opposed to Look Service Stations Ltd) was sold to Elf Oil (UK) itself in 1980, which might suggest that a portfolio of sites was sold to Elf at that point, with Frost then continuing to (re)build the chain, much as Gerald Ronson did a number of times with Heron. In 1981 the Bremar Trust bought 50% of Look Service Stations Ltd.

Chris Barker has a Look receipt here from a garage in Worcester www.flickr.com/photos/131286969@N05/49308822243

I am not sure the reasons / events behind the company / network becoming Save Service Stations in 1986; but I am presuming it was the same company or a successor, also led by Frost, based at the same address (by this point Sunley House on Oxford Road in Aylesbury), and at least from what I saw in Exeter, inheriting the Look sites.

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Taken in: UK / England / Aylesbury Vale / Aylesbury (show map)

Taken on: January 1, 1980

Tags:

Look

Look Service Stations

petrol

petrol stations

Save Service Stations

Selwood

Selwood Service Stations

Look Petroleum

Frost Group

Save Group « less

Sets appears in: • Petrol station logos and ephemera • Twenty-Six Hundred Petrol Stations

Groups appears in: • Period (pre 2000) British petrol station pictures • Motoring

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