Martin describes the work he did with Upstream in Dundee

Steve Milton: This is part three of Martin’s recording and in this part he talks about a project he was involved in with Upstream in Scotland.

Martin Robinson: I then got involved with a lot of research through Andy and Go Upstream. My first one was regarding disbled toilets and I could go on about disabled toilets all day! Suffice to say that my wife and I must have looked a bit odd taking photos of toilets. The report was written and I think it’s called A Public Inconvenience and we gave it…we showed it off to civil servants down in St Andrew’s Quay is it in Edinburgh.

And then with that we then got involved in the V and A. I was actually looking forward to that because I wanted to go and see the new V and A in Dundee but if you read the comment or look at the comment you can see it through my eyes and basically it was a terrible experience and I don’t want to go back.

All went great. It does sound a bit odd but we started off at hotel above the railway station which is 100 yards from the V andA. But in order to show how transport works with people with…fault of vision, for want of a better description, one of us went by taxi to the bus station and one of us went by bus to the bus station…We went to the transport desk in the station and to be honest they gave us the wrong bus. We ended up on a [inaudible] industry tour of Dundee…the bus station is only two stops from the station but I think we took in about 30 [laughter] because we went the wrong way.

The bus stop outside the Vand ;A is made of some kind of glass and it distorted the vision and you can see that well in the comment. You can then see if the bus doesn’t draw up to the pavement properly there’s a huge gap or it just looks like a trench and it’s…you don’t want to step on it because you think you’re going to step through it [inaudible] because I’m the character with a cane. Without going on a bus…call it a visitors’ tour but there’s hardly anything in Dundee to visit [laughter].

We then got to the bus station and I was…I last lived in Dundee four…fifty years ago now and the bus station looked virtually the same. It is terrrible. We went in eventually through a fire exit I think and it was just a long, narrow tunnel and that confused everyone. There was no easy signposting for which bus to get anywhere or anything. There was certainly no way of finding out where the taxi was.

It turned out that to get a taxi we had to cross the bus station forecourt where all the buses were and then cross the entrance of the bus station and then the taxi. Which to put it midly, it’s not very safe or amenable because you’ve got all the buses coming through and through so that got confusing.

I can’t fault the taxi driver, he was lovely. But one thing that showed me the difference in localities was that up here in Aberdeenshire we get a book and we can get £5 off every taxi ride and if it’s under a fiver you don’t pay at all, obviously. They didn’t have that in Dundee but because it took two or three minutes to get to the V and A.

Steve Milton: You can hear more about Andy’s work with Upstream in tomorrow’s diary.