Practical
Accessibility
Written plainly, because a family arriving with a wheelchair should not have to find this out at the door.
Both halves
What there is, and what there is not
Both lists are here rather than one, and the second is the more useful of the two. A page that prints only the good half has not made anything accessible; it has moved the discovery to the afternoon of the funeral, which is the worst possible time to find out.
What there is
- A ramp beside the front steps, with a handrail on both sides
- Level access from the porch to the chapel, the reposing rooms and the reception room
- A hearing loop in the chapel and in the larger reposing room
- Two accessible bathrooms on the ground floor
- Parking for eleven cars behind the building, two of them wide bays beside the porch
- Chairs at the graveside, brought as a matter of course rather than on request
What there is not
- There is no lift to the first floor, and the office is up there. If you would rather meet in the office than downstairs, tell us and we will come down.
- The garden path is gravel, which a wheelchair can cross but not comfortably.
- The nearest station has stairs on both sides and no lift, so a taxi or the bus is the easier arrival.
Tell us first
What to say in advance, so it is ready
None of these takes long. All of them take longer on the day than they do the afternoon before, and some of them cannot be done at all once a room is full of people.
- Somebody using a wheelchair. Level access from the porch to the chapel, the reposing rooms and the reception room, and the wide bays beside the porch are the ones to park in. Tell us how many places to clear at the front and roughly where the person would rather sit, so it is done before anybody arrives rather than in front of a full room.
- Somebody who needs the hearing loop. A hearing loop in the chapel and in the larger reposing room. Tell us which room you will be in and roughly where the person will sit, because it works better in some seats than others and that is worth knowing beforehand rather than during a eulogy.
- Somebody who cannot manage stairs. There is no lift to the first floor, and the office is up there. If you would rather meet in the office than downstairs, tell us and we will come down. Everything a family actually needs to do here happens on the ground floor, and the office being upstairs is our problem rather than yours.
- A language other than English. Between us we speak English, Spanish, Tagalog, Bengali, Nepali. If the language you need is not one of those, say so at the first call rather than at the meeting — it is a thing to arrange in advance, and an arrangement meeting held in a language somebody is only half following is how a name gets spelled wrong on a certificate.
The same applies to anything else: a service dog, somebody who cannot stand for long, somebody who needs to be able to leave quickly and quietly, a person who would rather not use the front door. None of it is unusual, none of it needs explaining, and all of it is easier when it is said the day before.
This website
The site itself, and how it is built
Every page here is plain HTML and every word on it is present before any script runs. Turn JavaScript off and the pages still read from top to bottom: the menu behaves differently and nothing disappears. There is no pop-up, no overlay that has to be dismissed, and no consent panel between you and the telephone number.
Every photograph carries a written description, and the description describes the photograph rather than repeating the page title. A screen reader gets told what the picture is of, not what we would like a search engine to think the page is about.
The layout is built to reflow rather than to break. Enlarge the text in your browser, or turn a telephone on its side, and the columns stack instead of overlapping or cutting off. Nothing on this site is a photograph of words, so nothing goes blurry or unreadable when it is made bigger.
Every link says where it goes in its own words, and there is a skip link to the content at the top of every page for anybody arriving by keyboard.
If it is hard to use
Telling us is genuinely useful
The list on this page is what we know about, and the things not on it are usually the things nobody here thought to check. If a doorway is narrower than it should be, if a page on this site is difficult to read, or if something was awkward on the day and nobody mentioned it at the time, say so. It is not a complaint and it will not be taken as one.
The reason to bother is that it is the only way the second half of the list above gets shorter. Somebody telling us about the gravel path is how the gravel path came to be written down as a problem rather than described as a garden feature.
If something here would be difficult, say so beforehand
A telephone call the day before is worth more than an apology on the day. Tell us what is needed and we will say plainly whether we have it.