ACCESSIBLE HISTORY
In England, designers adapt ancient sites for visitors with disabilities
The thought of visiting Tintagel Castle is enough to send shivers down any Arthurian legend-lover’s spine. But as my family prepared to visit England this past summer, we discovered two problems with a potential visit there.
Steps were the first issue. As many as 242 steps up and down, depending on the route visitors take to access the medieval cliff-top fortification on the rugged Cornwall coast. My 10-year-old daughter, Chloe, has a walking disability and gets around using forearm crutches and a lightweight transport chair. I knew such a climb would put the ruins out of reach for us.
But there was another, happier, reason we couldn’t visit: Tintagel Castle was closed for construction because English Heritage, the charity that manages Tintagel and more than 400 other historic properties, was building a footbridge linking the mainland to the headland where the ruins are located, finally allowing visitors with walking disabilities to bypass the steps and experience Tintagel Castle up close.
The new footbridge opened Aug. 11, just three days after my mom, Chloe and I returned home from our British adventure. The new structure re-creates a narrow land bridge that was used during the Middle Ages.
“It means that for the first time, visitors can experience the castle as a whole, as it was originally conceived, and crucially without having to tackle the steep steps which were the only option previously,” Liz Page, a historic properties director for English Heritage, said via email.
Tintagel Castle isn’t alone. We discovered that all the ancient sites we visited in England are actively working to add features to increase accessibility without compromising the historical integrity of their buildings or landscapes.
Retrofitting existing structures for handicap accessibility can be challenging under the best of circumstances. But when those structures and sites are millennia-old places of worldwide historical importance — that are also protected by laws that limit the changes that can be made — the task is even more daunting.
Take the Tower of London, where the entire site is protected, said Alfred Hawkins, historic buildings curator for Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that manages the tower.
Besides, the Tower of London wasn’t exactly built with friendliness in mind. It was, among other things, a prison, after all.
“As a fortress, its architecture has been designed with the single requirement of making access difficult or impossible,” Hawkins said via email.
Of all the ancient sites we visited, the Tower of London was the most difficult to get around with crutches and a wheelchair. There were uneven, cobbled surfaces and tight spiral
staircases. We tried to follow the Yeoman Warder tour, included with the ticket price, but quickly lost sight of our red-jacketed Beefeater guide when he took a route that included stairs.
Luckily, Chloe wasn’t interested in suits of armor, swords or tales of beheadings. Instead, her heart was with the opulent, glittering crown jewels, which we visited without trouble.
“The Jewel House exhibition is fully accessible for anyone with mobility issues, which is really important for us at the Tower,” Nicole Stockton-Davies, visitor services assistant manager at the Tower of London, said via email. “We have a powered lift up to the viewing platform, and the direction of the moving walkways (is) regularly reversed for wheelchair users, so they can still have a 360-degree view of the crown jewels.”
Outside of London, we found accessibility success at other sites, too, including ones that are even older than the nearly 1,000-year-old Tower of London, like the Roman Baths in Bath.
“The Roman Baths and Temple
Precinct were built 2,000 years ago and were never designed with disabled people in mind, and as the city has been built above the ruins over the centuries, they are below current street level,” Katie Smith, visitor experience manager for the Roman Baths and Pump Room, said via email.
Despite those challenges, Smith noted that 90 percent of the site is now step-free and accessible to wheelchair users, thanks to “clever solutions” that are permissible within its protected ancient status. For instance, workers suspended a new walkway over the Temple Precinct with “very thin superstrong wire strands from the ceiling” instead of resting it on the Roman stonework.
For our family, even the step-free access at the Roman Baths was challenging but manageable. Although the uneven stones around the Great Bath were difficult for the transport chair to move across, Chloe had no trouble walking over them using her forearm crutches.
Coming in 2020 is a newly excavated area next to the Great Bath, “which will have accessible interpretation and fully accessible walkways,” Smith said.
The site with the best accessibility was also the oldest: the Neolithic Stonehenge, which is about 5,000 years old and opened a new visitor center in 2013 that Page says allowed English Heritage to “radically improve access.”
“Now, all the visitor facilities and exhibition space are accessible to wheelchairs, pushchairs and small mobility scooters, while state-of-the art buses, adapted for wheelchairs, transport all visitors to the stone circle itself, from where there is a level circular route right around the monument,” she said.
Traveling to and around Stonehenge was not just possible for us, it was easy. We also experienced the site the same way every other visitor did, rather than having to take special, circuitous routes or traverse makeshift ramps.
Of course, accessibility isn’t just about mobility, which these sites also understand. That’s why you can find accommodations like descriptive tours for the visually impaired and “hidden disability” lanyards for visitors to wear at the Tower of London, and British Sign Language tours on handheld devices and free off-hours events for families with autism at the Roman Baths.
The accessibility at some ancient sites was better than others — it was good at the medieval University of Oxford but nonexistent at Glastonbury Tor — but overall, I was pleasantly surprised by how easily accessible most historic sites were to us and other visitors with disabilities, especially since that hasn’t always been our experience at home in the U.S. (city of Boston, take note).