The truck stop where Led Zeppelin, The Who, and Hendrix met

In the late 60s, there was one place where you could spot Led Zeppelin, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix on the same night.

It wasn't a venue. It wasn't a festival.

It was a truck stop.

The Blue Boar at Watford Gap was Britain's first 24-hour service station. Halfway between London and everywhere else, it became the unofficial meeting point for almost every touring band in the country.

No mobile phones. No internet. Not even fax machines. No way to coordinate.

But every musician knew: if you're driving back - whether home to London or up north - you stop at the Blue Boar. Grab food, fuel up, see who else is around.

It was so legendary that Jimi Hendrix thought it was a London nightclub.

Brian Eno has a term for this: "scenius." Not genius - scenius. The collective intelligence that emerges when creative people accidentally collide in the same space.

The Blue Boar was pure scenius. A motorway service station that accidentally became the nerve center of British rock.

Here's what's wild: we have better connectivity now than those musicians could have dreamed of. We can video call anyone, anywhere, instantly. We have apps to find other creatives in our city. We can collaborate across continents.

So why do the best creative breakthroughs still happen when people bump into each other by accident?

Maybe because real creative energy can't be scheduled. It emerges from unexpected encounters, shared struggles, and the kind of conversations that only happen when you're both stuck in the same strange place at 2am.

I reckon you know what I’m talking about.

And today, we need more Blue Boars. Spaces where the work gets done, but also where the magic happens in between.

Just gotta keep on trucking.

This kind of creative collision - and how to design for it - is what I explore in my Groove Theory newsletter. Subscribe if you're curious about the spaces where breakthrough ideas actually happen.