More than 38,000 people pass through Shropshire’s motorway service station every week. They drink almost 3,000 cups of coffee, scoff around 2,900 burgers – and include plenty of famous faces.

Telford’s Welcome Break services off the M54 is the pitstop in the human race.

A group of daytripping children fall out of a minibus having discovered that their legs no longer work and tumble towards the Burger King; an elderly couple, en route to their holidays judging by the suitcases on the roof rack, emerge from a vintage Austin, stretch until they are double their previous size and almost skip to the loo; a lorry driver draws the curtains on his wagon and disappears from view; and car park canoodlers share their affections on the front seats of a green Vauxhall Astra.

Like the pit lane on a Formula One race track, people with places to go are so absorbed in the task in hand and the speed at which they must perform it before hitting the road again that they don’t see the buckets of blood, sweat and tears that are shed by a team of 85 staff behind the scenes who ensure that a transient population the size of four Ludlows is kept well serviced and the carousel of modern motoring is kept the move.

Did you know that at Telford services around 38,500 people pass through every week? That’s nearly the entire population of South Shropshire that need to be fed, watered and fuelled.

They drink almost 3,000 cups of coffee, hundreds of portion of fish and chips and scoff around 2,900 burgers hit the spot.

As a species, we are increasingly mobile. In a 24-hour world, our cars have become our offices, our lorries our beds.

It means that service stations now offer everything to keep the show on the road, including a 48-bed hotel, petrol station, internet access restaurants and award-winning toilets that have picked up the loo equivalent of the Oscars for several years on the trots.

Helping to keep us going is the job of site director Sonya Peacock, who understands from her own childhood experiences the joy of motorway services.

She says: “You want to have a look round and have a rummage. If it’s got a bridge it’s great because you can go to the other side. We are on one side which takes the thrill of running above the motorway away.”

As a marker that we are more mobile, the on-site Days Inn hotel takes bookings for around 270 rooms a week and celebrities are among guests on the go.

Media butterfly Christine Hamilton and her dickie-beau, husband Neil Hamilton, have been spotted and have set tongues wagging. Sonya has lost count of famous faces, but off the top of her head there’s Nicky the motormouth from Big Brother 8, the young chap off To Buy or Not To Buy and “the other one from The Goodies” who isn’t Bill Oddie or Graeme Garden.

Some people like the services so much they book into the hotel and stay there for ages . . . Alan Partridge is alive and well and living at the side of the M54.

“We’ve had people stop for months on end, living here because they are having a house built or renovated,” Sonya says. “We become very friendly with them and they get looked after.”

Tens of thousands of outsiders are about to flock to Shropshire for the V Festival and the hotel expects to awash with wellie-wearers. Sensibly, it seems, the modern nomad has a fear of tents and prefers waking up to a power shower than a mud bath.

As well as the debris of human consumption, a transient population will inevitably leave behind belongings, recently including a perplexing number of hula-hula skirts and a plethora of embarrassing stuff that Sonya won’t go into. “And we’ve got a graveyard of mobile phone chargers,” she adds.

Fuel is the food of the new mobile generation and on an average week some 150,000 litres of fuel are consumed, with the needle rising to 180,000 litres on a busy week.

And did you know the services had a cat?

“Somebody left it behind, it was great for keeping the rats down,” Sonya explains. “But we woke up one morning and we had some added-on extras – it had had kittens. The RSPCA came and picked them up and the mother stayed here. She’s happy here.”

Animals, it seems, are as partial to motorway services as people. One bird of prey – unidentified by staff but “it was enormous” – turned up trapped in a roof rack and the RSPCA were out again.

Services stations are places where strangers cross paths, and where the direction of life can take a turn.

“It is a convenient meeting place for many people, you see people having interviews in the restaurant,” says Sonya, pointing out a businesswoman who’s been doing the Alan Sugar bit all morning.

“On Fridays it’s coach city with kids going to adventure places. You get schools from inner cities coming here and it’s a bit of a shock to them because it’s so green.”

Over on the coach park there’s some serious sleeping going on. Drivers whose cabs are named ‘Derek’ and ‘Ace’ have their curtains firmly shut.

“It’s like a little community and you find that with some drivers you do get to know their faces.The number of lorries on the road has increased and on the M54 we have had a large increase in the number of foreign lorries, which is good.”

Indeed, she has noticed such a rise in traffic, that the services built five years ago could do with being twice the size.

Driving is very stressful and Sonya, who sees some drivers clearly feeling the effects, reveals that in the open-air picnic area she is considering installing a tree for them to hug.

As I leave an hour later, most of the cars, coaches and lorries are different, as people have packed up and taken their lives with them.

All apart from the canoodlers in the car park, that is . . . who are still at it, and clearly don’t need a tree to cuddle.