Ramp Rage

A founding member of Access Thanet, a disability campaign group in East Kent, looks at designing landscapes fit for disabled people.

Christine Tongue

Access Thanet

Christine Tongue is a disabled writer and film maker, and a founding member of Access Thanet, a disability campaign group in East Kent.

As you get older, gravity becomes your enemy. Your legs need help from sticks and wheels, and your surroundings take on a whole new aspect – often hostile!

I have been dependent on a walking stick for many decades, but recently I’ve gained a new lease of life by acquiring a mobility scooter. But I’ve also become a Dalek — before they learned how to fly. Steps can stop me in my tracks.

My town, Broadstairs, is a small Victorian seaside resort, with narrow streets, listed buildings, music festivals, and Dickens Week, where the whole town dresses in crinolines.

It’s beautiful. But for people with mobility problems, it’s a nightmare. In my scooter, I depend on dropped kerbs on the pavements to get me from one side of a road to another. But they’re in short supply, and in many streets, I have to depend on houses which have drives and dropped kerbs for their cars. With narrow pavements blocked by parked vehicles and A-boards, I’m constantly being forced into the road.

In the centre of Broadstairs, on the other hand, is a kind of shared space, made of bricks, and with rounded kerbs marking the road edge. My scooter can easily move from pavement to road with only minimal shaking. Why aren’t all kerbs like that?

Our main beach, Viking Bay, has a tiny harbour and all the facilities a day tripper could wish for. But not for us wheelies! To get to the beach there are steep slopes on two sides — a scary trip for me, as tipping backwards is 1 always a hazard on a scooter — but if I were in a wheelchair, it would be nigh-on impossible.

Down to the harbour is another steep slope. It’s all ancient stuff: the arch over the road is probably Tudor and can’t be widened, and so it narrows to a single track with no pavement. This means, again, I’m forced into the road with the traffic. Most drivers are nice and wait for me to go through, but why can’t priority be given to pedestrians and wheeldependents? (Speed bumps, by the way, give me bigger bumps than cars so that’s not the answer.)

Shared space in Broadstairs. Rounded dropped kerbs

© Christine Tongue

Christine demonstrating outside Broadstairs seafront lift

© Christine Tongue

There is a lift down to the main beach from the cliff top. Hurray! But frustratingly, it’s closed for most of the year! Boo! The local disability campaign group, Access Thanet (of which I’m a member), has campaigned for it to be open all year round, but the council who runs it is short of cash. There are so many good things on the main bay: a bar, tea kiosk, chips, sandwiches — but no access at all for people like me when the lift is closed. That’s a terrible shame because when it’s open it gets me to the beach where there’s a wooden walkway right across the beach which leads to … guess what? Some steps! Talk about unjoined-up thinking! Just getting into buildings around town has been a big campaign for Access Thanet. A group of us go round with a wheelchair user who asks “How do I get in?”. Sometimes it only needs a tiny homemade wooden ramp to allow wheels up a single step. But why are buildings still made with steps at all?

What has recently infuriated me more than anything is our lovely town centrepiece, Pierremont Hall, built in 1785, where Princess Victoria spent her childhood hols. It’s now used for town council meetings, voting at elections, and local events, like craft fairs.

To get in there is a choice of wide impressive steps (no handrail) or four smaller steep ones. Access Thanet campaigned for many years to get a decent ramp. What they used to have was a nightmare: two planks linked together and balanced on the top step. It was wobbly and prone to collapse.

I was so pleased to find that a long metal walkway had been installed which twists around the building from the car park to the hall’s patio thus bypassing the impressive flight of steps. Up I went on this elongated zigzag, only to find myself confronted by, surprise surprise, yet another huge step. Just to rub it in, there was even a notice: MIND THE STEP! A craft fair, mulled wine, and homemade cake was inside the hall. I was stuck outside.

A staff member explained that no builder they’d asked so far wanted to take on the task of adapting a listed building for disabled use: “But we do have a ramp at the other side of the hall.”

“Is it two planks?” I asked. She nodded. “No thanks!” I said.

As it is, there is a lot in Broadstairs for me and other disabled people to enjoy. But there’d be so much more if those people in charge of the world who are not living with a disability could imagine what would happen if their legs, too, were to pack up one day and what that would mean to them.

The step into Pierremont Hall

© Christine Tongue

Ramp consisting of two planks

© Christine Tongue