Childerley Gate filling station - prices

Image: © Keith Edkins Taken: 14 Jul 2008

The future-proofed description: This picture was taken after Britain adopted metric measurements (except for miles on road signs), but before it joined the euro currency. No decimal points are shown (due to space constraints after a period of rapid price rises required the use of an extra digit), but potential customers would readily have understood the sign to mean 121.9 pence per litre, etc.; with the autoGas (propane) being supplied and measured as a liquid. Unleaded (petroleum) and diesel were, at the time, the most commonly used fuels in the personal transportation devices known as motor-cars, with the heavier freight transports (called lorries or trucks) pretty much entirely run on diesel. Jet wash was a system for cleaning the said cars by high-pressure water jets. bp Ultimate was a trade name for a fuel formulation which claimed to reduce soot deposits in internal combustion engines, giving improved engine performance and reducing some types of pollution. bp was an international energy supplier, having long outgrown its earlier name of British Petroleum, and liked to use the green sunny flowery symbol thing to show how environmentally conscious it was. All this became academic when Cambridgeshire disappeared under the sea due to global warming, a significant proportion of which was caused by use of bp's products.

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