I can be a silly, irrational sod sometimes, or perhaps I have too much time on my hands, but today I felt that I needed to exorcise the demons of yesterday. The fact that I wasn’t able to get myself back from Battersea without trouble and without help bugged me. All the tube stations on my route home had been marked as accessible, so it shouldn’t have been a problem to get myself home. Just to make absolutely sure, this afternoon I took another trip to the power station and back. I got the bus to Woolwich and then the Lizzie Line to Tottenham Court Road; then I found my way to the Northern Line, making sure I found the right spot on the platform. In the end it wasn’t a problem , and I was in Battersea in less than an hour. Then, after an hour or so exploring Battersea and it’s very pretty riverside park, I made exactly the same trip home, all without a problem.

The fact remains, though, that I shouldn’t have had a problem yesterday: I shouldn’t need to be careful about which train carriage I get on, or which stations I can use. They should all be accessible.  Of course I know the issue is the older lines and stations: the newer lines, such as the Jubilee Line, DLR and Elizabeth Line are perfectly fine for the most part. It’s the older Victorian lines in central London which are the issue. As I wrote here, before it does anything else, before it starts work on any other major projects, London should update all its existing tube stations to make them more accessible. That’s obviously more easily said than done given how much work certain stations would require, and would probably cost more than putting on another Olympics, but the fact that so much of London’s public transport system remains totally inaccessible for people like me is completely unfair. While there’s no denying that an incredible amount of progress has already been made in the last two or three decades, as I found yesterday with my impromptu visit to Goodge Street, London has a vast amount of work still to do on this front. If it’s city council really cared about those of it’s citizens who use wheelchairs, surely before starting any other infrastructure projects, it would make sure what already exists is accessible to all.