Category: Accessibility

Winter At The Young Vic

If you live in the UK like me, you’ll be well aware that we’re getting another blast of winter from the weather gods right now, including some snow. Which is lovely to look at if you don’t have to go travelling in it – yay to being a homeworker! – but on the whole I think we’re all looking forward to spring and some warmer weather more than ever.

But as we’re still in the winter season at the moment, it felt like a very appropriate time to go and see a play called Winter by Jon Fosse, which was on at the Young Vic theatre from the 14th-24th February. Granted, it’s got nothing to do with the weather, but the title and timing is appropriate. And it is quite an unusual play compared to the ones I’ve attended so far. So I wanted to tell you a bit about my experience.

Before I do, there are a couple of important points to note for transparency:

  1. I was among a few visually impaired bloggers very kindly offered complimentary tickets by the theatre to see the show, as they were extending their accessibility services for this production and wanted our feedback. However, all ramblings and opinions here are my own, the theatre have had no input into this post.
  2. This is a spoiler-free review. Although the play’s run at the Young Vic has finished, it will appear in other venues, just it has done in the past. So there’s a chance other people interested in the show will find this post, and I don’t want to ruin anything!

Now that’s sorted, let me tell you how things went last Friday. I hope you enjoy reading about it.

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Museum Of London

To escape from the freezing weather at the weekend, I spent a couple of afternoons looking around the Museum Of London, which I haven’t yet been to since moving here. I think I may have been there once as a kid, but I don’t recall it in any detail. It’s a really interesting place though, covering the entire history of London through a huge variety of exhibits. So I was really looking forward to exploring it, as I’ve always loved the city since I was a child visiting relatives here, and I’m now very happy to be actually living here.

My first visit on Saturday afternoon had a dual purpose, as I was helping a lovely lady called Rafie Cecilia from University College London with her PhD study into assistive technology for visually impaired people at museums. This basically involved me wearing a camera on my chest to record what I was looking at, while Rafie followed me around and took notes on what I was doing, and then she recorded an interview with me afterwards about my experience. She’s very friendly and professional, and it’s wonderful that she’s looking into this kind of thing, so I enjoyed the experience. This is our second of 3 meetings in fact, having first got together at the Victoria & Albert Museum in December, and I’m looking forward to meeting her again at the Wallace Collection soon. And I know she’ll be reading this, so hello! 🙂

I had only intended to visit for one day this weekend, but as I didn’t get to see the entire first floor on Saturday, I decided to go back and finish it off on Sunday. That only took another hour though, which was quicker than I thought it would be. So I ended up going downstairs and looking through all of that floor as well. Sure, I didn’t read or view everything along the way, as I couldn’t see it all clearly enough, for reasons I’ll get to later in this post. But I did get to see a lot of lovely things, and took hundreds of photos along the way, so I got a lot out of it overall.

So in this post I want to tell you about my visit, and show you just a handful of the many photos I took. I hope you enjoy!

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Tate Modern Audio Tours

Note: The Tate app referred to below is no longer available, but I hope you still enjoy reading about my first visit to the attraction.

On Saturday I decided to visit the Tate Modern, as I had stumbled upon the fact that they now have a mobile app giving audio tours around the place, as well as other features that tell you more about the art on display, the activities on offer and where to eat and go shopping.

The last time I visited the Tate Modern was as a kid with my family, which I don’t remember clearly now of course (but I did record a bit of video footage at the time). So it’s been on my list of places to explore since I moved to the city, and this was a good opportunity.

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Science Museum – Information Age

I haven’t just been looking at Harry Potter things this month. I’ve also been to other museums as well. And in this post, I want to talk about the Information Age gallery at the Science Museum. I explored the exhibition over a couple of visits, as there’s so much to see in there. It was all very interesting, and I was also curious to try a special accessibility app that had been developed especially for it. So this post is a little review of my experience.

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Harry Potter – A History Of Magic

As well as the Harry Potter Studio Tour I explored earlier this month, I was also lucky enough to go to the British Library last Monday, for their exhibition on Harry Potter: A History Of Magic. This has proven to be extremely popular, because all of the tickets are now sold out online for the rest of the run (though it may be possible to get a ticket on the day you go to the library if you’re lucky). So I feel very fortunate to have had a chance to see it. Big thanks to Emily Davison from Fashioneyesta for inviting me to explore it with her, as we had a lovely afternoon.

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Harry Potter Studio Tour

Harry Potter has been cropping up with some regularity in my London itinerary over recent months. Back in October I saw The Cursed Child at the theatre, complete with a touch tour on stage and audio description during the show, which was amazing, And shortly after that I did the Tour For Muggles, which was a very enjoyable walking tour around filming locations in London. And later this month i’ll be going to the British Library’s History Of Magic exhibition.

But last weekend I did something which trumps all of that in the Harry Potter stakes, by visiting the Warner Bros Studio Tour: The Making Of Harry Potter. So in this extensive post I’m going to tell you all about my experience, including some of my thoughts from an accessibility perspective, and the merchandise I picked up.

I’ve also been posting some photos on my Instagram during the week, along with an extensive Facebook album as well. Plus there a few videos to go with this post, featuring my review of the tour, footage from the studios and my merchandise haul. So there’s plenty to get through, and I hope you enjoy it all!

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Beauty And The Beast & Rapunzel Pantomimes

Having not been to a pantomime for quite a long time, and with plenty of them taking place across London, it’s been fun to attend a couple of them during my first proper Christmas as a resident of the city. Especially as both shows had audio description as well.

So I figured I’d combine my reviews of them into one post, and I hope you enjoy reading about them!

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Wellcome Collection Tour

Following on from yesterday’s post about the V&A Museum, I want to tell you about another museum I visited recently for an audio described tour.

The Wellcome Collection is a museum that focuses on health, life, science and medicine, looking at what it means to be human. I went there a few times with the family when I was very young, although I have no clear memories of it. I just remember it was a place that we really enjoyed. So when I saw that VocalEyes had organised an audio described tour at the museum, I happily signed up.

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V&A Museum: Europe 1600-1815 Exhibition

The Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum is one of the most well-known and exciting museums in the city, because of the huge variety of fascinating historical objects it holds in its many galleries. So it was one of the places I was really looking forward to visiting when I moved to London.

I first visited the museum, and had a little tour of a few exhibits, back in April with the social group Thinking Bob. But last Sunday I returned to look at a room in one of their big exhibitions in detail.

I had chosen to explore the Europe 1600-1815 exhibition, partly because it’s easy to find next to the main entrance, and also because it had some accessibility features I wanted to try out. And this was a particularly good opportunity to visit, because I had agreed to be monitored for a research project.

A wonderful lady called Rafie Cecilia is conducting a very interesting PhD study into accessibility at museums for blind and partially sighted people, and I was only too happy to help her out, as visiting museums is one of the things I really enjoy doing. So I met her at the V&A and, after an initial chat to confirm my consent for the study, she attached some non-intrusive and comfortable equipment to me, before sending me off to explore while she watched discreetly nearby.

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November 2017 Favourites

Hello again, welcome to my latest Favourites roundup. Once again it’s a varied package, with some disability blog posts and events, a museum tour, no less than three musicals, another outing with Fashioneyesta, my first trip to a Lush store, the delights of the Lord Mayor’s Show, and more. So I hope you enjoy looking through it al!

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