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	TX: 30.08.04 - HOW GOOD IS DISABILITY ACCESS IN HISTORIC STRATFORD UPON AVON PRESENTER: LIZ BARCLAY

	BARCLAY The biggest change to the rules about disabled access will come into force in five weeks time. From the 1st October people with disabilities will have to have equal access to all public buildings and owners of many premises are having to invest to meet the new demands. Last month, on You and Yours, wheelchair user Mik Scarlett carried an audit of his local high street in Camden Town in London, that prompted fellow wheelchair user and chairman of the Heart of England Tourism - Sir William Lawrence - to invite Mik to check out Stratford Upon Avon. It's black and white listed buildings, small B&Bs and narrow canal side streets would appear to pose quite a challenge to open access. Sir William and Mik began their day with museum curator Ann Donnelly at the 15th Century home of Shakespeare's wife Ann Hathaway. 听 CLIP I that am curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deformed, unfinished ... 听 Hello and welcome to Ann Hathaway's cottage. As both the ground floor and first floor of the house are on several different levels it has been impossible to make the building accessible to people with impaired mobility. 听 SCARLETT It's a 3D environment where the photographs have been mapped onto 3D objects. So that you actually feel like you're in the room - instead of it being like a series of photographs that you see you are in a 3D environment and you can move round, by using the keys you can kind of move towards - I'm now moving towards a cupboard and it keeps telling me to press cupboard. I don't there's a cupboard key on there but I guess you press enter and I imagine that ... 听 COMPUTER Press cupboard. 听 SCARLETT Okay press cupboard. 听 COMPUTER This English oak press cupboard dates from about 1650. 听 SCARLETT And there you go - that's a press cupboard, I didn't think - I thought it meant press cupboard, I was looking for the cupboard key but - and then you can sort of use the keys to move around, I don't know what other things there are, let's go this way. 听 DONNELLY Well we're seeing the interior both upstairs and on the ground floor. In Ann Hathaway's cottage I think ground floor's a bit of a misnomer. You have to go up steep steps, even just to get to the kitchen and once you are in the building there's then about four changes of floor level, just on the ground floor alone. So at the moment Sir William's in the kitchen and he's looking at the bread oven. 听 COMPUTER The bread oven built into the back wall of the hearth is probably a 17th Century feature of the cottage. 听 LAWRENCE It takes you - the visual effect to places that you can't get to in a wheelchair. 听 SCARLETT As a disabled person you kind of grow up with this idea that new is good, old is bad and so obviously when I was invited up here to the home and the birthplace of Shakespeare - the bane of my teenage life - I sort of - you have this kind of picture of like old cottages and inaccessible Tudor buildings and also they're the kind of buildings that people don't exactly want to go right let's knock that wall down and open that door and put a ramp in there, it would be unfair to expect historic buildings to be quite so desecrated. 听 LAWRENCE They've taken enormous steps and made a listed building really accessible. 听 CLIP By the lord thou sayest true lad and is not mine hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench? 听 DAWKES Hello there you're very welcome, if you'd just like park over there there's a couple of spaces. My name's Ann Dawkes from the Penryn Guest House in Stratford on Avon, we're a four diamond establishment and we are looking to provide accommodation for disabled guests. 听 GUESTS Where you stay is not fairly crucial, it's crucial, because that's the kind of thing that makes a holiday away the most important thing really. 听 Lead the way. 听 DAWKES Would you like to come this way? 听 This ramp is new for us, we've had it designed by our local builder and so I'm very interested to see how we cope with it today. 听 LAWRENCE Well we all made it quite well didn't we. 听 DAWKES We've two rooms on the ground floor and the dining room. So this is the first ground floor twin bedded room. We have had quite a few disabled guests staying here who've brought a variety of wheelchairs and they seem to cope quite well. 听 LAWRENCE I look forward to seeing what the bathroom's like round the corner. Yeah I come forward and then back down. 听 DAWKES The door opens right back there. 听 LAWRENCE Well the first thing, funnily enough, I noticed when I went in there is that perhaps putting the door to hang the other way - so you get more access into the bathroom. It's little things like that. It's funny what people actually think about when designing things because I can remember actually being invited to do an opening ceremony of a new block of disabled rooms and I'd been assured that everything was fine when I got there and they had a really nice room with sofa and chairs and everything but there were no beds. And so I asked them where the beds were and they said - Oh they're upstairs. And of course there was no access to the upstairs. It was a bit too late then wasn't it really. 听 CLIP The barge she sat in like a burnished throne burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold, purple the sails ... 听 LAWRENCE Well Mik here we are on our final part of the day, which is our canal narrow boat hire company which sails into the basin at Stratford Upon Avon. 听 SCARLETT Cool, I always wanted to go on one of these days and I didn't know you could get on them in wheelchairs, so I'm really looking forward to this. 听 LAWRENCE I think you float and I don't, so I'll let you go in first. 听 SCARLETT I float do I, ho ho, I'm going to put my coat on, I've brought all me sailor's gear - I've brought like a mac and I've got a funny little hat as well. 听 CUNDY My name's Ian Cundy, I run Starline Narrow Boats here with my family. 听 ACTUALITY Right I jump on this sort of little lifty thing and then press the down button. 听 Okay here we go. 听 Go on a little bit further your wheels aren't - that's it. I can feel you putting your brakes on. 听 Oh smashing. 听 Okay just pop it on the bed there and then have a run around. 听 Okay I'm now going in. 听 There you go. 听 CUNDY We've actually been building boats of this sort of nature now for probably about 15 years. It's very open plan, the boat, you put too many doors on you get a lot of restrictions. So there's a fairly large bed at the back with a [indistinct word] that clips on there, so .. 听 LAWRENCE Probably going to go zooming off. 听 CUNDY You can shower anywhere in that bathroom area - wet room. 听 SCARLETT It's lovely isn't - loads of room. I didn't realise quite how low you are in the water until you look out the window. 听 CUNDY Because there's not much on the market that suitably drops into the boat for disabled people we've been making things ourselves and designing things and we've now built and we've got on this boat - we've got joystick steering, so you can just sit in your wheelchair and you can steer the boat from anywhere on the boat. We've got tilt transducers and suck and blow tubes - so that people that are completely paraplegic can put a tube in their mouth and by sucking and blowing steer the boat left and right and it works really well. On the drawing board we've got tilt transducers where you've got a pair of transducers in a baseball cap so that just by tilting your head left, right you can steer the boat. 听 SCARLETT Well all I know is I'm getting it done - booking it before you lot because this is something I've always wanted to do, I just think this is excellent, I'm flabbergasted. And I think it's funny that it is one of the things that cars and vehicles and kind of getting around is something that really should have real technical problems and yet people seem to be able to defeat that easily. Putting a ramp on a building - oh I can't do that, that's just too much. What you mean a big concrete ramp that you just lay and let it set and then it's done? Oh that's far too complex. So I think this kind of proves that we've seen listed buildings that have been adapted and now we've seen the pinnacle of adapted things and so it just proves it can be done. 听 LAWRENCE And what time do you get back to Camden on the boat then? 听 SCARLETT Yeah, that's it. 听 CUNDY To get to Camden would take about 10 days. 听 SCARLETT Cool. 听 LAWRENCE See you in September then Mik. 听 FLINDERS Mik Scarlett and Sir William Lawrence in Stratford on Avon. Back to the Transcripts homepage Back to the You and Yours homepage The 麻豆约拍 is not responsible for external websites

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