The Kings Arms

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The Kings Arms

3 Poland Street, London, W1F 8QL, United Kingdom | 020 7734 5907 | Website

squirrelpot

219

308

It's very difficult to get in, and there's no accessible toilet

Visit date: May 2015

This review is especially helpful for those who have or use the following: Powerchair

Overview

It's very difficult to get inside this pub in a wheelchair and almost impossible in a powerchair because of the big and complex step on the threshold, and there's no accessible toilet. Drink! be merry! and hold your bladder!

Transport & Parking

Lots of bus routes along Oxford St will drop you a few yards from the pub. No step-free train or tube stations nearby.

Access

The entrance to the pub consists of narrow double doors of which normally only the right-hand one is open, so if you're using a wheelchair or powerchair, someone will have to open the left-hand door too, which is fiddly. Then you have to negotiate a kind of complex 'hump' at the threshold, which is very difficult to get over in a wheelchair and if you're in a powerchair almost impossible, certainly risky. Once you're in, the downstairs bar is cosy and easy to get around, the upstairs bar (reached by a narrow and claustrophobic staircase) completely inaccessible.

Toilets

Zero points. No accessible toilet. The gents toilet is very small and notoriously squalid, there is a severe leakage problem and parts of the walls are rotting away from damp. The so-called 'Ladies' toilet is upstairs and is very tiny - there's hardly room to wash a hamster.

Staff

The staff are friendly, cheerful and courteous. The manager has strange ideas about the need to tidy away the bar furniture at a certain time each evening (normally around 8pm), and applies his rule about this with a draconian and inflexible disregard for the needs of individual customers, so if you walk with a stick and have difficulties standing and need a high chair to sit level with your friends who are standing, you may have to argue with him. Because of this strange lacuna in his otherwise cordial welcome, one star lost.

Anything else you wish to tell us?

I have been visiting this pub since 1983 so I have used it successively when I was fully mobile; when I was using a walking stick; in a manual wheelchair; and in a powerchair. I hardly go there now because of the problems I've mentioned above.