by
Scally » Mon Nov 21, 2011 6:17 pm
Mine's a reference book, does that count? Its "OPEN BRITAIN 2011" , described as "The definitive travel guide to Accessible Britain" and I asked my Library to buy a copy, which they did on payment of £1 (!) The book is apparently backed by RADAR, Tourism for All UK, and Visit Britain, and also carries AA, BT and shopmobility logos. It even has an introduction by Maria Miller, MP..
My reason for the library request was that I have been asked to help one of the Scottish Access panels with some access auditing, something I enjoy doing from time to time and helps pay the bills, and so was interested in finding out how useful this guide would be.
Unfortunately it only dedicates pages 271 - 297 to Scotland, and annoyed me by starting with the header:
"Small Country, Big Heart" . Small? Well, not exactly, Scotland is vast, with one of the longest coastlines in Europe, as well as nearly all of Britain's finest unspoiled wilderness areas, best beaches, thousands of islands, and our second biggest UK town centre for shopping (Glasgow, not Edinburgh, in case you wondered!!)
Apart from the usual guffy introduction about sparkling waterfalls, whisky, deer and shady glens, the rest of the pages mainly consist of a very self-selecting list of a number of hotels, caravan sites and attractions. Glad I got it through the library: pay £9.99 for 400 pages of adverts? Not good value, a real waste of space on any bookshelf.
Anyway, it does have some useful reference information, but not much you couldnt find on Google or Wikipedia, to be honest. And I couldnt help but feel that this guide was a very thinly disguised commercial "Where to stay" directory of paid-entry hotels and tourist traps, rather than a genuinely independent guide for disabled travellers. Some properties have been visited and inspected, but most have been self-assessed.
Most importantly, the
http://www.openbritain.net website and full database will hopefully be open for serious business in future. At the moment, if you search for hotels in (say) the Western Isles, only one establishment comes up, and this is clearly inadequate. If there is a future for publications like this, it is surely either online, or as a series of regional guides, rather than one very limited publication which promises so much, but delivers so little.
Curiously enough, the editors may agree: apparently in future the annual guide will be replaced with a monthly magazine format.
