I’ve been to London. Well, I say I’ve but really ’twas the Clan Pickard: me, GLW and the two kiddies. We had a couple of nights staying with my Dad and his family in Brentwood (and the kids were delighted to see Grandad, Nanny and their Auntie and Uncle), and a couple of nights staying in a Holiday Inn Express.

But what we actually got up to will, for the most part, have to wait for a future post. What I want to talk about is how mind-boggling crap London is if you can’t do stairs.

We took two kids and a pushchair, and were capable of removing child from pushchair, carrying said pushchair up (and down) endless flights of stairs — not that it was easy mind you, but it was possible — but for someone in a wheelchair large parts of London must be almost completely out of bounds.

In that regard, I really must say that I’m ashamed of our capital city. I’ve never considered the North-East to be an exemplar of forward thinking, but when I try to go anywhere in the Newcastle or Gateshead, there are ramps and lifts almost everywhere. In London, presumably if you have wheels you are expected to stay at home.

In the interests of fairness and in contrast to London itself, I must say that Londoners however were very friendly, offering to help lift the pushchairs up and down stairs, offering to give up their seats for my wife on the tube (who was normally holding two children while I had a pushchair and a few bags) and so on.

But back to the wheels.

If you look at the Transport for London Underground map, you’ll see a little wheelchair symbol on the key, alongside the message:

Step-free access from the platform to the streetTransport For London: Standard Tube Map (PDF)

That is an important point. You are supposed to assume that all tube stations are inaccessible unless specifically stated otherwise. The stats below are based on my glancing along the tube map and counting, so it is always possible that I’m one or two out, but it’s still fairly telling…

• District Line: 15 stations out of 58 offer access to the platform without stairs — 26%
• Northern Line: 10 stations out of 50 offer access to the platform without stairs — 20%
• Central Line: 4 stations out of 49 offer access to the platform without stairs — 8%
• Circle Line: 3 stations out of 26 offer access to the platform without stairs — 12%

…if you really care about the numbers, or you have a favourite line you’re wanting to check, feel free to do so. But frankly, it’s shit. We are living in the 21st Century and for more than three quarters of the stations in our capital city to be entirely inaccessible unless you can use stairs is absolutely atrocious. This is the city that will be hosting the Paralympics in four years, you know…

Now I understand that many of these tube stations were built a long, long time ago, back when ideas like “disabled people having rights” were seen as somewhat wacky, but it’s really about time that they are brought into the 21st Century.

And it’s not just the tube, either. The signs don’t help.

For example, take Westminster: according to the map, this is one of the accessible stations, where you don’t need to use stairs. There is indeed a lift. But according to the buttons in the lift, this only serves the District and Circle lines, and as we wanted the Jubilee line, this wasn’t much use to us, so we fought our way down stairs/escalators carrying a buggy.

If the accessible stations are only accessible to certain platforms or lines, this makes the situation worse still. On the other hand, if the lift did serve the Jubilee line but chose only to tell you that it was serving the District and Circle lines, then this is hardly providing helpful information for tourists … which you would expect would be fairly common in Westminster, after all.

And then you’ve got the subways. Now most of London has pedestrian crossings. Basically, you press a button, the traffic lights change, the traffic stops, and you wheel across the road to the other side. It’s not complicated, it requires no special equipment other than a fairly standard type of traffic light, and everyone knows how it works.

Apart from in Westminster (and apparently surrounding areas). Instead, you are prevented from crossing the busy roads because you’ve got great big metal fences preventing you from stepping onto the road. Fine. However, when your only means of crossing the road seems to be to use a subway with steps (and no ramp), this proves a little trickier. In fact, we encountered this on something called ‘Buckingham Palace Road’. You might be able to guess what this is near.

So it appears to me that public transport in London is, for the most part, inaccessible to people with a wheelchair (and bloody difficult for people with a pushchair); and that you can only go and see Buckingham Palace if you can use steps. It’s beyond “not good enough”, it’s an embarrassment to the capital city, and by extension to the country as a whole.

So I’d like instead to propose that we simple rename London something else for 2012, find a nice accessible modern city, temporarily rename that ‘London’, and invite all the nice friendly Londoners to live there for a year while we hold the Olympics there. And then we’ll move it back again afterwards… what d’you reckon?