WE ALL carry with us semi-conscious ideas of what sort of things should feature in a typical holiday. Sun is likely to be high on the list, along with good food, beautiful hotels and something cultural or natural.

But what if one threw away the rule book and imagined a very different sort of holiday, one based around the ordinary, unfairly neglected and frequently fascinating corners of everyday life?

Too often, it seems, we unfairly glamorise places that are far away and unknown, and step around those that are to hand and superficially familiar.

That is what has inspired some colleagues and I to set up an unusual kind of travel agency, designed to take people around the ignored bits of the modern world, which we believe harbour a good deal of interest if one cares to take a close look.

A weekend away with Martin Parr

Sue Foll packs her camera for a break with the photographer renowned for capturing Britain on holiday - view the results

Through the agency, we are offering a holiday to Heathrow (a place full of remarkable poetry if you know how to look), a tour around the great British sky (with Gavin Pretor-Pinney, author of The Cloudspotter's Guide) and another to the Isle of Wight with the photographer Martin Parr (see left).

Yet the holiday I'm most excited about is a two-day trip up the M1.

Since the first section of the M1 was inaugurated in 1958, this central north-south axis has been a backbone of commercial and leisure transport in the UK. And yet rarely have people stopped to admire it as the extraordinary work of architecture, design, sociology and peculiar gastronomy it undoubtedly is.

We'll be kicking off at Brent Cross on a 48-hour magical mystery tour, and along the way we will meet historians, architects, truck drivers, pile-up survivors and pinball- machine designers. To understand the M1 is nothing less than to start to understand the modern world.

Take service stations. Whole books could be written on their distinctive designs and philosophies. David Lawrence, author of Always a Welcome - The Glove Compartment History of the Motorway Service Station, and one of the speakers on our holiday, has the merit of having visited almost every service station in the land and detects in their changing styles of design a map of the very soul of the nation.

When the first motorway service station was opened on the M1 at Watford Gap, its spirit was determinedly futuristic. As Lawrence points out: “The operators' backgrounds were in television, bingo, dancehalls, milk bars and Miss World: a kind of Dallas meets Disney meets Star Trek fantasy dropped down in Middle England.”

When Woodall services opened in 1968, it became a favourite destination for a lunch out for many who lived in the vicinity. They would come for the sole purpose of admiring the sweep of the gigantic plate-glass windows and the roar of the traffic below them.

The menu boasted gammon steak with pineapple every day of the week. Yet with the oil crisis of the 1970s came a distinctively more modest approach to service station architecture.

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