Seriously?

[davidgillon]

I went into Rochester for lunch on Saturday. Parking was a nightmare, but when I finally found a place I cut through the High Street via the small disabled car park as usual. For unknown reasons (it's not any of the local festivals I can think of, and I couldn't dig up anything on their website) the Council had the paved area at the entrance covered in stalls - one of those square garden gazebo things with a folding table under it and various vendors at each. Then I got onto the High Street, and the footpath is covered in stalls for as far as I can see. And those gazebo things are the full width of the pavement. Look left, and the pavement is completely blocked, look right (where it's very slightly wider), and they have a stall sitting on top of the kerb cut. The only part not blocked by the stall is the slope, and the customers are standing on that. In just the 100m or so I could see, the footpath was completely blocked to wheelchair users in at least 3 places.

I managed to squeeze past and onto the kerb cut, but no chair wider than mine could have done it, certainly not a powerchair.  Okay, the High Street is pedestrian-only on Saturday, so the road was usable, but to get into any of the shops you need to be on the pavement and that pavement is really difficult to wheelie up onto from the road. In fact it's impossible in my chair if I have the anti-tips out, and wheelie-ing is exactly when I'd want the anti-tips. I did manage to get back up the kerb cut on my way back to the car, but I'd seriously expected not to be able to as you would normally want to run straight up the slope to the far side of where the table was and then turn, not crab up the side-slope between ramp and pavement level.

And then the elbow I'd banged while I was away decided it wasn't up to pushing up slopes - guess which way it was all 400m back to the car. Waddle, waddle, waddle....

Bah!

Not too surprising that I fell asleep on the couch at 8PM, though sleeping through until midday Sunday was unexpected.

I was sarcastic about the stalls to the council's  twitter account. Apparently they'll "raise this with the town centre manager". I may go dig up the relevent councillor and copy them into the thread - the High Street's an obstacle course at the best of times, never mind if  the council start merrily blocking the pavement every 20 metres.