Peterborough Cathedral

Squirrelpot

06 Nov 2016

A lovely place for a wheelchair user to visit

4.5

4.5

Date of visit: November 2016

I am a disabled person. I have experience of challenges around: accessing toilets and moving around.

I use or have experience of: disabled toilet

Overall Rating

Excellent

Peterborough Cathedral is a lovely place to visit and very easy to get into, and around, if you're a wheelchair user. Strongly recommended, with two caveats about the accessible toilet provision.

Disabled Access In and Around

Good

The entrance to the Cathedral is through the middle arch of the magnificent west portico, with an automatic door at the very outside and a push-button electric door just inside the portico. Unusually for an English cathedral, the whole of the interior is on one level, without any steps at all. So you can cheerfully zoom around the whole cathedral at your whim and see everything. If you can get onto a guided tour, do it! The guides are extremely friendly and knowledgeable (special thanks to Ann who was our wonderful guide on the day we visited) and make the visit a much richer experience. Just one thing was unsatisfactory: my carer was not allowed to have a free ticket for the guided tour. This is very unusual - almost everywhere a carer goes along free, so that the fact of being disabled does not involve the disabled person in discriminatory extra expense. One star lost for this. I got in touch with the Cathedral afterwards and they said that this was not their policy, that my carer should indeed have had a free ticket, and they have agreed to refund me the cost of his ticket. So if staff try to charge for your carer's ticket, remind them firmly that it's the Cathedral's policy that carers go free.

Parking & Transport

Excellent

Peterborough Station provides full step-free access and extremely friendly assistance, there are modern (2013) lifts to all platforms. The station is about 10 minutes walk/roll from the Cathedral. Be careful - the route is very badly signposted and you may get temporarily very lost.

Accessible Toilets

Poor

There is an accessible toilet but it's not in the Cathedral itself, it's in the adjacent Learning Centre. It's not satisfactory: 1) The Learning Centre closes promptly at 4pm, long before the Cathedral closes. If you need an accessible toilet after 4pm you will need to get a member of staff to unlock the Learning Centre for you. On the day I visited, this was not made clear to me, so I was left with the very disagreeable impression that disabled people cannot use the toilet after 4pm, which is not actually the case. Better communication is needed on this. 2) The toilet cubicle is narrow and there isn't really room to manoeuvre in your wheelchair. I found it a very tight squeeze, and that's in a fairly compact wheelchair. People with larger wheelchairs will really struggle.

Staff

Poor

Everyone we encountered was friendly and helpful, but the staff did not know the rule about carers not having to pay for tour tickets, and although they told me there was an accessible toilet in the Learning Centre, they did not tell me that if I needed to use it after 4pm, which is when the Learning Centre closes, I would have to seek out someone with a key to let me in - giving the impression, therefore, that the accessible toilet is simply unavailable after 4pm. All this results an overall rating of two stars for staff - but five stars for Ann, our tour guide.

Additional Information

I would definitely recommend visiting Peterborough Cathedral. After publishing this review I was in touch with the Cathedral management and they have agreed not only to refund my carer's tour ticket, but also to ensure that staff are correctly briefed on free carer tickets and on telling people the exact arrangements for the accessible toilet, which *is* - contrary to my first impression - available for use at all times when the Cathedral is open. So I hope and expect that your visit will be more pleasant and less problematic than mine was!