The future becomes the past...

The futuristic flying-saucer shaped Megatron building which landed at the junction of the A1-A14 eighteen years ago has disappeared off the face of the earth.

Ironically perhaps, in their coverage of the Megatron's demise, the Peterborough Evening Telegraph use a Google Earth picture of the Megatron taken from space, a service unthinkable when some bright spark dreamed up the mad Megatron concept.

Like most people, I often hurried past it heading towards the M11, but never felt the need to dine there.

When it arrived in 1990, it relied on personnel from the nearby US Air Force base Alconbury to leave their base and sample British culture and cuisine by picking up a Megatron burger ordered at a computer console and flipped by staff in space-style uniforms.

Its decline seems to have coincided with the end of the Cold War, which came soon after it opened, when many of the Americans and their families who were over here went back over there.

The Megatron was eventually taken over and relaunched by McDonalds, but has been rotting away for years - before the bulldozers moved in this week.

I suppose it never really took off...