Overview

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.

Transport & Parking

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.

Access

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 set of steps just in front of the lift. I cannot believe that anyone actually decided that this ridiculous and dangerous set-up was OK! NB there is a ramp running down from the basement lift doors to the shop floor (on the left-hand side of my photo, not clearly visible), 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. 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

Toilets

I didn't find a toilet. I will not be going back to this shop so I will never be able to report back on whether it does or doesn't have a toilet. Sorry.

Staff

I didn't interact with any staff.

Anything else you wish to tell us?

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.

Photos