Finsbury Park station now has an accessible toilet, in addition to the station’s existing standard loos.
Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), who operate Great Northern and Thameslink trains, have installed the new accessible facility on Platforms 7 and 8 — which is in addition to the standard toilets on the same platform, and the extra men’s toilets on Platforms 3 and 4.
Finsbury Park station’s new accessible toilet (c) GTR
The toilet complements the recently completed Access for All project, a major government-funded scheme by Network Rail providing step-free pedestrian routes between the platforms and the street.
Keith Jipps, GTR’s Infrastructure Director, said: “We’re committed to making train travel as easy and comfortable as possible for everyone. We know how important accessible toilets are to many of our customers, so they are always one of our top priorities for our station improvement budget, wherever there’s space to install them.”
New accessible toilets opened at GTR stations in the past year also include Palmers Green and Biggleswade, taking the number on the network to more than 100.
Regarding the accessible toilet at Biggleswade it’s a pity that work on making the station has been delayed by a further year. The station consists of island platforms, and it currently has no lifts to any platform.
I suspect quite a few stations could probably be retrofitted with an accessible toilet relatively easily. I dare say in some cases they might coincidentally reduce the number of manned ticket counters at the same time to ‘make space’ for it.