Waterstones

Date of visit: May 2025

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

A good place for a wheelchair user to shop for books but the display tables rammed too close together make access to the books very difficult for a wheelchair user and DO BEWARE when exiting the lift at basement level - see below.

Disabled Access In and Around

There is a lift to the spacious basement, but it's tucked away in a remote corner of the ground floor, I couldn't find any signage to tell me where it was, the lift buttons made no sense - a random assortment of unlabelled discs, some of which were buttons, some weren't: really baffling. BEWARE when you exit the lift in the basement floor. Because the lift is quite small, a wheelchair user is likely to enter the lift forwards on the ground floor, and leave the lift backwards in the basement. If you leave the lift backwards, BE VERY CAREFUL because if you go a few inches too far you will tumble backwards down a pair of steps just in front of the lift. I cannot believe that anyone actually decided that this ridiculous and dangerous set-up was OK! There is a ramp running down from the basement lift doors to the shop floor (see my photos), so these steps are not an accessibility issue: they are simply a *safety* issue because they are placed so dangerously close to the front of the lift. I very nearly tumbled down them backwards myself, because I didn't know they were there as I emerged backwards out of the lift. This is an accident waiting to happen, and very likely an accident involving very serious injury to a wheelchair user. Some display tables are positioned so close together that it is impossible for a wheelchair-user to move between them, which means that in practice many bookshelves are inaccessible. It's very hard to get around the tiny narrow gaps in the layout of this bookshop

Parking & Transport

Trafalgar Square and nearby Whitehall are well served by buses but there are no step-free stations in the vicinity, unless you use the suburban trains to and from Charing Cross, where ramp assistance, as at all mainline London stations, it a bit patchy and random.

Accessible Toilets

0

I didn't find any toilets of any kind.

Staff

0

I didn't interact with any staff.

Additional Information

Message to Waterstones: please reconfigure the basement lift area, those steps are a terrible safety hazard and someone is going to be very badly injured - or already has been.

Add commentThanks