It's very difficult to get in, and there's no accessible toilet
2
2
Date of visit: May 2015
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
Poor
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!
Disabled Access In and Around
Poor
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.
Parking & Transport
Poor
Lots of bus routes along Oxford St will drop you a few yards from the pub. No step-free train or tube stations nearby.
Accessible Toilets
0Zero 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
Good
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.
Additional Information
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.
