Alan A two night city break in Prague, a fairytale city built on cobbles. How I learned the route before I left home, why the trams deserve more respect than the cars, what happened when nobody recognised my white cane, and the trick that gave me Charles Bridge and Prague Castle entirely to myself. Read Time – 12 Minutes
I spent an entire Saturday walking up and down somebody’s driveway, and covered more than seventeen kilometres doing it. Goodwood is loud, dusty, crowded and physically punishing, and it is still one of the most accessible major events I attend, because it gives you enough ways to make the day your own. The platforms were full, Future Lab defeated me, and none of that mattered by the time I found the one car I had come to see.
22 min read • Micro-case studies included
The day before Goodwood, a friend asked which single car I most wanted to find. I answered without hesitating, and then I found it, unroped and close enough to lean into. What I didn’t expect was the man standing beside it, who told me that if you drive a car hard enough to break it, you haven’t failed, you’ve found your next improvement.
6 min read • Special Report
Before I lost my sight, I drove, and I loved it. This week the RNIB invited me to climb inside one of the Waymo test cars now learning the streets of London, and to hear what a room of thirty visually impaired people really thinks about handing the wheel to a machine. This one is different: a special report from an afternoon where hope and hard questions sat side by side.
Read time: 11 minutes.
I very nearly turned round at Cambridge station, unable to find the shuttle and wondering whether the whole day was a mistake. What changed my mind wasn’t an aircraft at all, but an A-Team van, a scientist holding thousand-year-old ice, and a running commentary that quietly told me exactly where to look. At Duxford the flying is extraordinary, but it’s the people who make you want to come back.
16 min read • Micro-case studies included
I don’t own a Ferrari and never will, so I wasn’t sure a Sunday morning Cars & Coffee was a morning for me. I went anyway, and read a black silhouette, a white one and an impossibly wide one off their shapes alone, only to find I’d photographed a Daytona SP3, a McLaren P1 and my first ever Pagani Utopia. You don’t need to own the car to belong on the square.
5 min read • Micro-case study included
Years of assuming a library full of books wasn’t for me, undone in a single afternoon. The Magna Carta read through a phone camera, an original Enigma machine, and a member of staff called Stephen who left his desk to walk me there himself. Sometimes the hardest barrier is the assumption you never thought to test.
7 min read • Accessibility checklist included
A museum exhibition that asked me to experience it, not view it. Low light, dark blue walls, a soundscape, a giant plesiosaur hanging overhead, and an ammonite millions of years old that I could actually put my hands on. The hard part wasn’t navigating the dark. It was slowing down enough to let it work.
8 min read · Accessibility checklist included
London’s most overwhelming market, and somehow one of my favourite places in it. Thousands of people, traders shouting over the trains, dozens of languages, and a white cane in the middle of all of it. The first time, I fled to a burger at the edge. Now I queue twenty-five minutes for a sausage roll and mean it.
8 min read · Survival strategies included
The ship is the easy part. The real challenge starts the moment I step off it, into an unfamiliar city every morning with a white cane and only a rough sense of which way the sea is. Lost in Barcelona, rescued by a stranger at a Bruges ticket machine, and nineteen storeys up a ropes course because curiosity won.
8 min read · Accessibility checklist included