Travellers World

Travelling with a wheelchair — the good, the bad and the not-a-chance

Tag: changing-places

  • The accessible toilet that wasn’t

    There is a particular sinking feeling that every wheelchair user and every carer knows. You have found the accessible toilet. You have got there in time. And the door will not open, or it opens onto a mop bucket, a stack of high chairs and a broken parasol.

    It happens constantly, and it happens for a small number of very repeatable reasons.

    The five ways it goes wrong

    1. It is being used as a cupboard

    The most common failure by a distance. The accessible toilet is the biggest room with the fewest daily users, so it quietly becomes storage. This is worth mentioning to a manager every single time, politely and without heat. Half of them are genuinely embarrassed and clear it out.

    2. It is locked and nobody knows who has the key

    Many accessible toilets are on the National Key Scheme, which means they use a standard RADAR key. Carry your own — you can buy one from Amazon, Disability Rights UK or a local council for a few pounds, and it is the single best value item in our bag. When a venue has its own key instead of a standard one, you are at the mercy of whoever is on shift.

    3. The emergency cord is tied up

    The red cord should reach the floor. It is there so that someone who has fallen can pull it. It gets knotted up out of the way because staff are tired of it being pulled by mistake. Untie it. Every time. It takes four seconds and it is genuinely a safety issue.

    4. The grab rails are on the wrong side

    Transfers are usually one-sided. A toilet with a rail only on the left is unusable for someone who transfers to the right, no matter how big the room is. There is nothing to be done about this on the day, which is why we ask about it in advance.

    5. It exists, but you cannot use it

    A standard accessible toilet assumes you can transfer yourself, or with one person’s help. If you need a hoist and a changing bench, a standard accessible loo does not help at all. That is what Changing Places toilets are for — larger rooms with a hoist, an adult-sized bench and space for two carers. There are now several thousand across the UK, and new large public buildings in England have been required to include them for a few years. The Changing Places website has a map, and we plan long days around it.

    What we do

    We find the toilet first, before the coffee, before the exhibition, before anything. It sounds joyless and it is not — it is the opposite. Knowing where it is, and that it works, is what lets you relax and actually enjoy the day.

    Your turn: if you have experiences of your own — the places that got it right, and the ones that got it badly wrong — tell us in the comments below. Every report helps the next traveller.

  • Motorway services: the stop is part of the journey

    Motorway services are the part of the journey nobody writes about, which is odd, because on a long drive you will spend more time in them than anywhere except the car. For us a services stop is not a pause in the trip. It is one of the legs of it, and it can go wrong in all the usual ways.

    The good news first

    Services are actually one of the more reliably accessible environments in Britain. They are modern, single-level, automatic-doored, and legally obliged to be open to everyone 24 hours a day. Blue badge parking is free (the general two-hour free rule applies to everyone, but badge bays sit closest to the door), and nearly every major services has an accessible toilet. A large and growing number now have a Changing Places facility too — the big room with the hoist and bench — and that is worth planning around.

    Plan the stops like you plan the route

    Our rule: on any drive over two hours, we choose the stop before we leave, rather than taking whichever services appears when someone needs it. Because:

    • The Changing Places map tells you which services have one. If you need it, that decides the stop, full stop.
    • Services vary wildly in distance-from-car-to-door. Some have badge bays right at the entrance; some have them across a lane of moving traffic.
    • The RADAR key comes with us, because accessible toilets at services are sometimes on the key scheme — and occasionally “closed for cleaning” at exactly the wrong moment, at which point the staff can open the second one they usually have.
    • Fuel matters too: some forecourts will send someone out to help you fill up if you can’t get out — there are apps and horn signals for this — but it depends on staffing, so the reliable move is to fuel where a second person can jump out.

    The details that separate good from bad

    • Counter heights. Most food units are fine; ordering screens set high or card readers bolted at standing height are the modern nuisance. Staff will always come round, but you have to catch someone’s eye first.
    • Seating. Fixed benches bolted to fixed tables are everywhere in services, and they are exactly the restaurant booth problem again. Look for the loose chairs; there are always some.
    • The 2.0m height barrier on the “premium” parking nearest the door at some sites. The badge bays are fine, but if they are full, the overflow may not be, if you drive anything tall.

    None of this is difficult. All of it is the difference between a ten-minute stop and a forty-minute one, and on a long travel day those thirty minutes are the margin between arriving fine and arriving done in.