The built environment profession needs to treat access and inclusion as integral to everything it designs, learn from the lived experience of people today, and build in flexibility to respond to changing needs, demographics and expectations.

That was according to Chris Watkins, senior consultant at Arup, at last week’s Accessible London: creating inclusive spaces webinar.

The session, part of NLA’s Diverse Leaders programme, sought to overturn the many barriers that inhibit access across the city, looking at exemplar projects in the process. Watkins said there were big changes in demographics and society and the way that we are designing and using spaces could be ‘real enablers’, if done well. 

‘The way we work is changing’, he added, ‘and I think a lot of companies over the last year or two have been forced to ask what offices are really for. I think it's important to make sure that the needs of disabled people be reflected in that. If offices are just being turned into meeting spaces, we need to remember that for a lot of people - for example, people with ADHD – having that workplace separate from the distractions of the home and physical journey into work, to help with that mode-shifting, is absolutely essential’.

Equality law is relatively new, Watkins went on, with the first elements of the DDA coming into force in 1995, and we are all becoming ‘more disabled’ in the sense that people are living longer and older, with better birth rates. ‘Inclusive design is just about making things equitable in use, legible and easy, and offering that choice and flexibility’.

Helen Taylor of Scott Brownrigg had earlier talked about inclusive design through a number of projects the practice has designed across education, heritage and hotel buildings. ‘We're dealing with building regulations, typically when we're thinking about how we provide the appropriate technical standards for buildings’, said Taylor. But disability access doesn’t always reflect the whole diversity of equality that we’re looking for these days’, she added. ‘The Equality Act is not the same as building regulations; just meeting building regulations does not necessarily mean you are going to help your clients meet the Equality Act. And I think that's where sometimes there can be a mismatch’. Access requirements need to be thought of from the outset, and one of the important elements is in making people feel welcome, regardless of their background.

Other speakers included Neil Smith, Inclusive Design Lead at HS2 & Chair of LLDC’s Built Environment Access Panel, which he described as the direct result of policies implemented leading to stopping the notion of inclusive design being only about designing for disabled people. The new London Plan, Smith said, contained a favourite policy that was changing things on the ground – that inclusive design is indivisible from design. ‘We can’t divide the two’, he said. ‘If we don't design inclusively actually we're not designing for the people that will be using our designs…our environment needs to reflect the people that live in it’.

Amanprit Arnold, Senior Infrastructure Planning and Policy Officer, GLA and Public Practice Associate spoke – and signed – about ‘Deaf Gain, or the different perspectives offered by those with hearing difficulties. ‘If you get things right for disabled people’, she said, ‘then you get it right for everybody’.  Finally, consultant Ross Atkin said to design inclusively was to consider everyone’s needs, collecting lived experience via a tool to send back to the people making design decisions – and the ‘trade-offs’ they have to make.