One of the books about the 60's that I'm currently reading is Days in the Life by Jonathon Green. It's a fascinating series of interviews with people involved in the counterculture.
From an interview with June Bolan:
"You always went home after a gig because you couldn't afford to stay anywhere! You'd do Newcastle and back in a night. There were no motorways to speak of. They loved the Floyd out in the sticks… The highlight of the evening if you'd been to Newcastle and were coming back was to go to the Blue Boar, the service station. You'd see people like the Small Faces, Spencer Davies, the Soft Machine."
The Blue Boar is one of those things that turns up incidentally in a lot of books about the sixties. Now Watford Gap Services, it's well remembered for the people who passed through. From a post on a motorway services blog: "Jimi Hendrix is reputed to have been under the false impression that the “Blue Boar Cafe” was some trendy nightclub, because his British contemporaries mentioned it so often"