Overview

The Smallbrook Meadows website states that it is wheelchair friendly, but it has 5 gates, none of which can be opened from a wheelchair or mobility scooter, and if you are able to get off your wheelchair or mobility scooter to open the gates you therefore have to do this twenty times if going both ways (opening and closing) and carry something with you to hold the gates open while you go through. This is despite a total lack of need of any of the gates for most of the year because livestock are rarely in this area and British Standard BS5709-2018 stating that gates must be least restrictive and good practice being recognised that gates are secured open, or removed, when livestock aren't present. If the small section of the meadows that the footpath runs through was secured with double gates from the rest (as it is with a kissing gate near the park), at present its just a single gate, the only time that the gates along the path need be closed is when livestock are present. Alternatively if the pasture along the footpath were turned to woodland (an extension of the existing adjacent woodland) there wood be no need for gates at all. Wiltshire Wildlife Trust will no doubt say that the gates have been improved from kissing gates that existed before (through which no mobility scooter could pass) but this is only a minor improvement for disabled people who can get on and off their wheelchairs and mobility scooters 20 times without harm, nothing like the improvement to zero gates that could easily be achieved if disabled people were really welcome, as the Equality Act 2010 requires.

Transport & Parking

Access

Toilets

None

Staff

None

Photos