Who says listed buildings cannot be accessible?

Canopy of Kettner's on Romilly Street in Soho.

The application for planning approval for this large and complex site in Soho, Westminster is now complete and submitted. Withernay Projects worked closely with the design team, led by Soda., to propose a transformation to fifteen Georgian townhouses to create significantly upgraded and much more usable accommodation for Kettner's and Soho House private members' club, and 28 new guest rooms.

Eleven of the buildings on site are Grade II Listed, meaning that any changes to them are subject to Listed Building Consent under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act. This does not mean that the current level of access cannot be improved. In fact if the proposed scheme is completed nearly all of the guest and staff areas within the buildings will be fully accessible. The exceptions are one small room on each of the upper levels of Soho House, and the regular hotel rooms. Five of the 28 guest rooms will be accessible / easily and quickly adaptable to suit the needs of a wheelchair user.

If anyone tries to tell you that older, listed buildings cannot be modified to improve access into and within them, then please put them right and direct them to Withernay Projects! Other examples include Peterborough Cathedral, the Christ Church Spitalfields Crypt and York Theatre Royal.

Liberia free of Ebola

Fountains at Somerset House

So what has a picture of the courtyard at Somerset House got to do with Liberia? Well it was here that I took a break from seeing the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition on Sunday. I don't think I was alone in needing some fresh air after seeing the Iris D'Or winning series of photographs by John Moore (Getty Images). Moore visited Liberia twice while the country was in the grip of Ebola and these photographs are the result.

On Saturday the World Health Organisation announced that Liberia was free of the disease at last. A public holiday was declared and people celebrated victory over the disease that took so many of their friends and family. Ebola continues to affect people in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

My interest in Liberia comes from knowing people who have worked there as reporters and aid workers, and from having twinned my toilet with one in Bana Town. The need for adequate sanitation continues in Liberia and in many places around the world. Populations in areas affected by conflict and natural disasters, such as the recent earthquakes in Nepal are especially in need.

Please take a look at the Toilet Twinning scheme.

New Approved Document M: Return of the cats

The three categories (cats) of the new Approved Document M for dwellings.

The new approved Document M (Access to and Use of Buildings) - Volume 1: Dwellings is now available on the Planning Portal and will be in effect from October 1, 2015.

The guidance is divided into three categories: 

Category 1: Visitable dwellings;

Category 2: Accessible and adaptable dwellings; and

Category 3: Wheelchair accessible dwellings.

Of these, only dwellings designed to meet category 1 are mandatory. The proportion of a development that is required to meet categories 2 and 3 will be set by the local authority through planning conditions.

Category 1 is broadly similar to sections 6-10 of the current (2013) Approved Document M. Category 2 is based on the Lifetime Homes standards, but with some significant changes, and Category 3 has some similarities to the Wheelchair Housing Design Guide (2006) but with more detailed guidance about accessible kitchens and bathrooms.

Rachael has given several about the changes to the residential access standards over the years, and in particular about Part M in recent months. Please get in touch if your practice is interested in learning more about it.

London Plan 2015

The London Plan - The Spatial Development Strategy for London Consolidated with Alterations Since 2011.

The latest edition of The London Plan was published today by the Mayor of London, with policies that look ahead to 2036, taking into account the rate at which the capital's population is predicted to increase by.

Pamela

Tracey of Proudlock Associates at the Pamela laboratory.

How do new ideas for streets, train stations and other aspects of the built environment get developed and tested? The London & Southeast region of the Access Association visited PAMELA in north London to find out.

PAMELA sign.

Dr. Catherine Holloway is UCL's lecturer in Accessibility Engineering and researches the effects of access aids like tactile paving and ramps on tube platforms at PAMELA. Catherine showed us the laboratory, which is currently set up to examine how people with dementia could be helped.

We talk on a large raised platform with carpets, walls, tables, chairs, crockery and cutlery to simulate a domestic environment. An incongruous array of streetlamps is suspended above the room without a roof. These are used to create realistic street lighting for the more urban experiments and will soon be replaced with LED lamps that can switch between different lighting scenarios much more quickly.

Street lights in the PAMELA lab.

The whole laboratory will decamp to a brand new campus in Stratford in a couple of years, where PAMELA's floor area will expand significantly.

Videos of people wearing various coloured hard hats while alighting from a static replica of an London Underground carriage had us asking whether the lab can really recreate the behaviour of tube passengers in a helpful way. Catherine and her colleague Derrick explained that they are analysing CCTV footage from five cameras on London Underground platforms to assess this, and also that the more undesirable behaviour of the tube network has occurred in the lab, which was a surprise.

Catherine's research is focused on the biomechanical effects of wheelchair use on the human body, and the risk of shoulder injury in particular. Other current areas of research include ARCCS, an app that uses crowd-sourced information about the accessibility of routes, including information of ground surfaces and inclines, and wearable assistive materials (WAM).

Our discussions included the ethical and physical intricacies of gathering data from experiments, how access solutions like ramps for buses in the real world rarely resemble 'perfect' lab conditions, and using wheelchairs on escalators. 

If you've now got a certain song stuck in your head (like I have) it's probably due to the above description of PAMELA's room without a roof.

There's a Wocket in my Pocket

Guests at the Pocket event at the Swiss Church in Covent Garden

Innovative residential developer Pocket has something new up its sleeve that was revealed at an event last Thursday in London. The Swiss Church in London's Covent Garden was a great choice of venue, being just around the corner from Pocket's offices in Floral Street, and having a barrel vault that design director Russ likened to the Pocket philosophy in its efficient and attractive design.

Pocket's one-bedroom compact flats have proved hugely popular with their owners who might otherwise be priced out of owning their own home in London. The company is building on this success with the two bedroom, two person concept and this event presented the ideas of nineteen architectural practices about how this could be done.

The London Housing SPG of November 2012 sets out the minimum required space for dwellings of different sizes in London, but standard 4.11 does not mention two bedroom, two person units. Pocket has established that that there is a market for this type of unit that includes joint buyers who are not a couple and single parents.

Thank you, Pocket, for an interesting and very social event. There were no wockets in attendance that I noticed. Perhaps they were hiding with the wosset in the closet of one of the apartment models?

Russ Edwards of Pocket and Peter Murray prepare to present architects with commendation awards.

Cups with handles

Teapot, cup and flowers on a cafe table.

“I was in a well known Belgian owned coffee and pastry shop recently where their cups have no handles. When I explained that I couldn’t grip the cup without a handle, they told me that it didn’t suit their style to cater for people like me and that they didn’t get many ‘of my type’ in there. Little wonder.”

— Commenter on BBC News article about the recent DisabledGo Report.

“Why don’t you just find a café that has cups with handles then?”

— A response to the comment above on the BBC News article about the Report.

These are two of hundreds of comments made on a BBC News article of November 6th, about DisabledGo's survey of over 30,000 UK shops and restaurants. The first describes dreadful customer service and discrimination, and its response is typical of many of the comments made on the article that show that we've still got a way to go with changing attitudes as well as adapting buildings. The key findings of the report include:

“ Two thirds of retail staff have no training in how to help disabled customers; 40% of restaurants and a third of department stores do not have an accessible toilet; and 20% of high street shops have no ramps for wheelchairs.”

— DisabledGo news page.

Providing an option of cups with handles is similar to providing a choice of seating in public spaces and many other aspects of inclusive design: different people have different needs. When it comes to sitting down for a rest the people who need to do so most are often denied the opportunity if seats without armrests are the only option. Anyone who has suffered back pain will know how difficult it is to stand up from a seat like this.

The Belgian-owned coffee and pastry chain lost a customer that day, and given the media's attention to the DisabledGo report, I imagine it will lose a few more.

International Day of People with Disability

Sign at the entrance to Sutton House in Hackney

Did you know that Wednesday December 3rd is the 2014 International Day of People with Disability? While some people may grumble about there being 'A Day' for everything they are a useful way of raising awareness and encouraging understanding of the groups that they represent.

International Day of People with Disability and World Toilet Day (see this post) are two that I particularly support.

The image at the top of this post was chosen firstly because it made me laugh: the world is not yet inclusive enough for disabled people to expect to be to get into a sixteenth century house in the same way that everyone else does. Signs like this usually direct people to an alternative entrance. Secondly the sign is a reminder of the aim of inclusive design; that one day everyone will be supported by their environment without the need for segregation according to ability.

Sutton House is well worth a visit. Unfortunately many parts of the interior involve steps and other obstacles. I wish I'd made a note of exactly how much can be seen without steps. From memory the entrance level with Tudor Oak linenfold panelling, cafe and courtyard are step-free. The cakes and coffee in the cafe are also recommended.

World toilet day

World Toilet Day banner.

I've written before about why I've twinned my loo with one in Liberia, but today is World Toilet Day so here are some statistics about the Cord and Tearfund Toilet Twinning campaign.

"Lack of access to clean water and effective sanitation impacts the health of a community as well as their ability to develop economically. Here are some of the hard facts:

• "2.5 billion people across the world don’t have somewhere safe to go to the toilet (WHO / UNICEF)
• Bad sanitation is one of the world’s biggest killers: it hits women, children, old and sick people hardest
• Every minute, three children under the age of five die because of dirty water and poor sanitation (WHO)
• Right now, more than 50 per cent of hospital beds in developing countries are filled with people who have an illness caused by poor sanitation or dirty water (UNDP)
• In Africa, half of young girls who drop out of school do so because they need to collect water – often from many miles away – or because the school hasn’t got a basic toilet.
• The lack of a loo makes women and girls a target for sexual assault as they go to the toilet in the open, late at night
• Many women get bitten by snakes as they squat in the grass to go to the toilet
• For every £1 spent on a water and sanitation programme, £8 is returned through saved time, increased productivity and reduced health costs. (UNDP)
• In 2000, 189 countries signed up to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. The sanitation target for 2015 is currently way off-target and won’t be met in sub-Sharan African until the 23rd century."

On November 19th last year 96 toilets were twinned. This year the target is 100. Right now (09:40) the counter on the Toilet Twinning website is at 16. Here's the latrine in Liberia that my loo is twinned with.

Toilet Twinning certificate.

There are more ways to help on the WaterAid UK site.

How many people in the UK are disabled?

A couple of slides from a talk given today to a group of architects. Some more statistics about disability from The Papworth Trust, based on data from the 2011 census are below:

Children

• 17.6% of UK population are between 14 or under.
• 6% of children are disabled.
• Only 17% of disabled people were born with their disabilities.

Working age

• 66% of UK population are between 15 and 64.
• 16% of these people are disabled.
• UK employment rate among working age disabled people was 49% (4.1million), compared to 81.8% of non-disabled people.

State pension age and older

• 16.4% of UK population aged 65+.
• 45% of these people are disabled.