SIMON HILLS reckons his experience is no better or worse than anyone else’s. Just bog standard when you’ve got a disability. Which, perhaps, makes it all the more depressing. Car accident. Aged 24. In a wheelchair ever since. “Bloody arse to get around anywhere.”
The bigger, savvier places can be OK, he says. It’s the smaller places — boozers, clubs, local shops — that can be the right pain. “But, d’you know what’s most bloody annoying? Loos. There you are, dying for a piss and you spend half an hour trying to get your right toe into the cubicle. Be easier to carry round a potty.”
On October 1 the nation’s loos will come to a standstill, blockaded by an army of wheelchairs. The deliciously named Free2Pee Big Night Out, by the disability charity Scope, calls on Britain’s 8.5 million people with disabilities to make their presence felt on the night, using direct action to road test how easy it is to have a pee in public places.
“It’s not about shaming venues,” says Victoria Shooter, of Scope. “It’s just a lighthearted way of drawing attention to a serious matter.”
The matter being the final part of the Disability Discrimination Act coming into force on October 1. By law any place providing a public service — from pubs and clubs to butchers, bakers and candlestickmakers — must have made “reasonable adjustments” to their premises or how they provide services so they aren’t unreasonably difficult for disabled people to use. Trouble is, millions haven’t. “Many venues are woefully unprepared,” says Sarah Langton-Lockton, director of the Centre for Accessible Environments. “And it’s not as if it’s been sprung upon people.” The Act was passed years ago.
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Most worrying are the everyday small services providers that Hills complains about. Scope estimates that less than half of all pubs and clubs have an accessible toilet. Langton-Lockton blames the media in part for “highlighting the negative, saying small businesses will go to the wall because they have to pay out for expensive changes. But that’s not the case. The key words in the act are ‘reasonable adjustments’. We’re not expecting small businesses to spend millions.”
Hills was right. His experience isn’t special. Speak to any person with disabilities, and they’ll reel off the horror stories (a man with cerebral palsy chucked out of a club by bouncers who thought he was drunk), and the dull old day-to-day “does he take sugar?” experiences you get used to, but which wear you down. The problem is in part simple ignorance in the able-bodied majority, owing, perhaps, to the absence of so many of those 8.5 million disabled people from the streets, owing itself to said streets being built like an obstacle course. Disability charities have long warned of the isolation of people with disabilities, which so easily breeds disabilism. “What Big Night Out does,” says Shooter, “is get disability right out there where you can’t miss it.”
“It’s not just about putting in ramps,” says Langton-Lockton. That smacks of tokenism. It’s about empathy. “I don’t want to be seen as an irritating minority making demands,” says Simon Hills. “I don’t want to have to ask for help, or be asked all the time.”
The DDA demands only minimal standards; the real aim, especially in new buildings, is what’s called “inclusive design”, defined by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) as that which can be “easily used by as many people as possible without undue effort, special treatment or separation”.
The challenge, then, is how to make accessibility architectural. “It’s startling to think that designing a building to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible should be so startling,” says Langton-Lockton. “But architects have an entrenched culture of designing for idealised people.”
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The architect Jane Simpson, adviser to the RIBA on access, and access consultant for Aedas architects, is optimistic that architects are changing their views. “Some have, I won’t say ignored it, but let’s just say there are other things in their in-tray. But that’s mostly the one-man band who’s been in practice for 30 years. For younger architects, inclusivity is becoming second nature.”
“The key is to make inclusive design effortless and invisible,” says Denise Bennetts, from Bennetts Associates, whose Richard Attenborough Centre for Disability and the Arts in Leicester was one of Britain’s first purpose-built “inclusive” buildings.
“Inclusive design is something in which Britain is leading the world,” adds Langton-Lockton. She gives “top marks” to English Heritage for making changes subtly and not tokenistically. This was vital architecturally too. You don’t want the Tower of London riddled with ye olde rampes; if they’re necessary, at least keep them in context.
Sometimes this demands lateral thinking. At Blickling Hall, Norfolk, a lift was installed in one of its Jacobean turrets. The DDA, though, does not override listing, and sometimes a physical solution can’t be found for the most sensitive sites. Even then, Langton-Lockton praises the way English Heritage has improvised with virtual tours or exhibitions. The best adaptations avoid ghettoising disabled access so that it looks “special”.
One young architectural firm, though, has done the opposite. When Surface Architects were asked to add a disabled toilet and lift for users of the Medical Library at London University’s Queen Mary’s College, they could have tucked it away discreetly. Instead they put it slap bang in the crossing of the library building, the deconsecrated Grade II* listed late Victorian church of St Augustine & St Philip — “the cathedral of the East End” — tucked behind the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel.
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Surface are young, ambitious and speak like they’ve swallowed a French philosopher’s dictionary. This was to be no ordinary lift and loo. This was to become the Ambiguous Object, a conceptual study in symbolism and “the secular pursuit of knowledge”. “Why not grab the chance to make the most of the most ordinary architectural feature,” says the co-founder of Surface, Richard Scott. Why not indeed!
The lift and loo are housed in a beautifully detailed, metal-clad, rectangular block, almost classical in its rectilinear composition, sliced here and there with light-filled slits, completely at odds, physically, with the brick and stone gothic all around. Yet, somehow it fits perfectly, glowing like some space-age Neolithic monolith. Only the printed slate pattern on the metal overeggs the pudding. Its “ambiguity” lies in its apparent solidity. It is in fact split, the top half hanging as a pendulum from the ceiling, swaying faintly in the air conditioning. It’s mesmerising. And yes, Simon, you can fit more than your toe inside.
WHERE THERE’S A WHEEL: TRICKS FOR INCLUSIVE DESIGN
WITH ITS fine neo-Corbusian composition — smart grey bricks, weatherboarding and wrap-around landscape windows — the Richard Attenborough Centre for Disability and the Arts at Leicester University got Bennetts Associates shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 1998. But it’s the seamless integration of inclusive design that really impresses. A few tricks are obvious: wider doors and lifts, lower desks and sideboards, the roomy loos. Your eye may follow the red strips on the staircase steps, the “two wheelchair wide” corridors, the bold colours, tones contrasting against white walls for the visually impaired, or the line breaking up the huge glass windows. But the rest of the design is invisible, like the low-ceilinged entrance leading to the triple-height atrium which, with its tactile surfaces and subtly managed acoustics, means that the space is easily understandable, never dull.
DEBATE
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Which public buildings are the worst offenders?
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