Esso (Mobil) Station
Location: Birstall, UK
Architect: Eliot Noyes
Completed: Late 1960s

Listed by English Heritage in 2012, these are one of the last surviving examples of Eliot Noyes' delightfully quirky filling stations for Mobil, 19,000 of which once served motorists across the UK and US.

In the Sixties, Noyes was asked to redesign Mobil's filling stations; the brief asked for an instantly recognisable and aesthetically pleasing design. The project, named Pegasus, was a total design concept which encompassed shapes, colour schemes, and logos (Noyes hired the graphic design firm Chermayeff & Geismar to redesign the Mobil logo, which in turn influenced the red and blue colour scheme of the stations).

The first station opened in the US in 1966, and set to tone for the others, with their striking canopies of individual, over-lapping circular units, reminiscent of the 1937 design for the service station at Skovshoved, Denmark, by Arne Jacobsen (see page -----).

Noyes developed variations of his design, which came into use internationally, varying from single large stand-alone canopies to very small individual units, which simply protected the pumps.