Weds Wrap is replaced this week with the BBS Awards for venues that excel in style, accessibility & disabled facilities. The team have been ‘flash mobbing’ around London awarding 2.5 and 3 BBS Tick certificates to those venues we’ve audited over the year. We’ve also posted a number of awards to venues out of town, the full list can be found here.
Here’s the press release on why we did this now – we didn’t just do 3 Ticks but a selected number of 2.5 Ticks for venues that almost made the highest accolade of 3 BBS Ticks:
Blue Badge Style Three Tick Venues List Out Today
Window Stickers and Certificates Delivered by Wheelchair
London, 28 August 2013, Blue Badge Style announces its first list of Three Tick venues on the anniversary of the 2012 Paralympics. Fiona Jarvis, founder of the first app and website guide to a stylish lifestyle for the less-physically-able, is delivering certificates and window stickers by wheelchair to the Blue Badge Style reviewers’ three ticks venues.
39 of the 850 reviewed venues get three Blue Badge Style Ticks, including Skylon, Zetter Town House (where everyone has to sit down), Shoreditch’s Tramshed, Sartoria (one of the first places Blue Badge Style gave three ticks to), Edinburgh Castle and the Royal Festival Hall. The full list of venues can be seen on the Blue Badge Style website. Another 50 venues have 2.5 ticks, which can often mean a steep ramp, a disabled toilet also used as a storage room, or maybe they’re just not quite stylish enough!
Blue Badge Style grades cool venues on accessibility, facilities and style using its tick rating system to give a score out of 5 for each category: 1.Access, 2.Facilities and 3.Style. The scores are then aggregated to a number of Blue Badge Style Ticks from 0.5 to a maximum of 3. Blue Badge Style wants people with limited mobility to know exactly what to expect from each venue and have the confidence to try somewhere new when out and about.
Fiona Jarvis explains “mobility, or the lack of it, doesn’t mean that I’ve lost my sense of style, but I do want to know what to expect before I go into a venue. The Blue Badge Style stickers and certificates means that people with limited mobility and equally importantly, their friends, don’t have to be surprised or embarrassed by a lack of accessibility or facilities at a cool venue. They can see from the window that a cool bar or restaurant has the Blue Badge Style seal of approval.”
She continues, “Style is the overriding premise of Blue Badge Style, along with a positive outlook” says Fiona Jarvis, “as our Paralympians proved last summer, disability need not stop you from enjoying life!”.
Why not tell us if you spot a BBS Recommended sticker, you could be the first & win a prize!