Access no areas: the day wheelchair activists stopped the traffic | Letters
Imported
Prof Gerry Leavey remembers a 1990s protest in London’s Oxford Street – which ended up as a courtroom farce
Your feature on the BBC TV drama Then Barbara Met Alan (Let’s storm Parliament! The punks who risked their lives to fix ableist Britain, 11 March) reminded me of my first outing as an able-bodied activist for the Campaign for Accessible Transport in 1992, when we blocked Oxford Street to a mixed reception – but mostly to howls from enraged drivers.
It took an hour for the police to arrive and, of course, when they did, mindful of the negative publicity in lifting people in wheelchairs into police wagons, they first bundled me off to the nearest police station. Within a couple of hours, they nabbed everybody else – wheelchair user or otherwise.
