Yesterday I went on one of my long, exploratory walks. This might sound a bit weird, but you could say I’m a fan of the jubilee line. Whenever I never to go anywhere, I just get on a bus to North Greenwich and head into the metropolis. Most major destinations are accessible from the jubilee line, from the Olympic park at Stratford to the Houses of Parliament at Westminster to Wembley stadium. And now Crossrail is open, to get on that I just have to go one stop to Canary Wharf. For the most part it’s all cool and accessible.

Yet, frustratingly, there are still many places in the metropolis which aren’t so easy for me to reach. It’s Proms season, so a few days ago I began to wonder how I would get to the Royal Albert Hall if I wanted to. The nearest tube station to it is South Kensington on the District Line, but that isn’t marked as accessible, and is in fact quite a walk from the hall itself. It struck me as odd that such a notable landmark would be so cut off from the public transport network, when so much progress has been made in modernising it and making London easier to get around.

Yesterday afternoon, then, I decided to see whether I could get to the Albert Hall and back. To be honest I didn’t go there directly: first I took the Elizabeth Line to Tottenham Court Road and then had one of my exploratory trundles around that area. My initial plan had been to look around that area for a bit before finding my way to Westminster and heading home from there. I wanted to see a bit more of the parks in that area too before the weather starts to turn.

However at one point I found myself in Kensington, where I started to see signs for the Royal Albert Hall. That, of course, made me curious so I decided to follow them. That is quite a strange area, full of high end shops and expensive hotels, but without much really going on. To put that another way, I didn’t see anything which would make me want to go back there. When I reached the Hall itself, I was struck by how outdated the area seemed, as if it hadn’t changed much from its Victorian heyday.

By then, the afternoon was starting to drag on, and I was getting hungry. My first line of enquiry was to find the tube station to see whether it could perhaps be updated and made accessible. Yet reaching it I realised that there was no chance of that happening: the station is surrounded by museums on both sides, and has very old looking steps to get down into it. To be honest seeing that was quite disappointing. For such a major cultural venue, you would hope that the Albert Hall would be served by a modern, accessible tube station. After all, I’ll never forget watching the Cat Empire there with Charlotte and James, and hopefully I’ll be going to many more concerts and events there in the years to come.

I then set off to see about busses: were there any bus routes which would take me directly to a jubilee line station? Unfortunately this turned out to be as woeful as the tube: in stark contrast to, say, the o2 which has it’s own dedicated bus station, I found myself having to go quite a way to find the nearest bus stop, and even then I had to ask a volunteer to guide me to the correct one. Fortunately, using his mobile phone he found me a direct bus to Green Park, from where I was able to get a Jubilee Line train back to North Greenwich.

I still think London is a great, great city, yet it still has a long way to go in terms of accessibility. I can get around some areas of it perfectly well; but others, like the area I explored yesterday, are in urgent need of updating. While the Albert Hall is a grand, beautiful building, it’s also a fragment of a very wheelchair unfriendly past: looking around it yesterday I realised that there was no way I could get into it alone, even if we put aside the issues I had getting there and back. That strikes me as such a shame given that so much of the rest of London and it’s public transport system are now accessible. This city has come so far in terms of accessibility, but it still has a long, long way to go.