This year's UK Disability History Month 2024 theme looks at disability livelihood and employment. At RIBA, we're marking this theme by highlighting what individuals and the wider built environment are doing to adapt and create accessible spaces that benefit everyone.
Recent ONS statistics show that there has been an increase in the past year of disabled people in employment. With 24% of people of working age (16 to 60) identifying as disabled, architects have a key role to play in improving how we all live and work within the built environment.
Inclusive Design Overlay
Developed with expert professionals and people with lived experience, our open access Inclusive Design Overlay to the RIBA Plan of Work offers best practice guidance to ensure that inclusion is considered at every stage of the design process.
RIBA Plan of Work: Why architects should augment inclusive design throughout all work stages - Explore how the landmark overlay argues that inclusive design is integral to good design.
RIBA Microaggressions Toolkit
This new toolkit looks at how practices can better understand, address and prevent microaggressions in the workplace.
Explore the full RIBA Microaggressions Toolkit.
Jane Simpson: Becoming an Inclusion Champion and creating accessible architecture
We're highlighting individuals who are creating more inclusive working environments. In this blog, architect and access consultant, Jane Simpson discusses her role as Inclusion Champion for House of Architecture and shares what architects can do to design a more accessible built environment.
Additional features relating to disability livelihood and employment
How architects can help when an occupant’s accessibility needs change
Producing personalised, accessible and well-designed spaces is crucial when a person’s circumstances change dramatically.
How to use inclusive design principles to create accessible design projects
Transforming five derelict barns into holiday homes for guests with accessibility needs called on key principles of inclusive design and her own judgement calls says Clementine Blakemore, the architect behind Wraxall Yard.
Wraxall Yard was shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize 2024 - watch the video below.
Adaptable, accessible, affordable: housing for disabled and older people
Read about our contributions to the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee inquiry on disabled people in the housing sector, and our roundtable discussion with the Older People’s Housing Taskforce. RIBA's Senior Policy Advisor, Charlotte Watson, offers a concise overview of our recent work on accessible housing provision.
From the RIBA Collections: How 66 Portland Place got its ramp
Forty years ago, a subtle but significant change was made to the front entrance of RIBA’s headquarters at 66 Portland Place: Douglas Stephen & Partners were commissioned to incorporate a ramp to the original stone steps, to improve access for wheelchair users.
Ever since, the updated entrance has benefitted from a pair of symmetrical, inclined paths that curve around the central steps. It was hailed as a thoughtful approach to conservation architecture and a vital improvement to the building’s accessibility.
Now, of course, the ramp would be part of a basic requirement for step-free access to new buildings, but when the ramp was added in 1984, building regulations for accessibility were still in their relative infancy. In the UK, the first real legislative recognition of the need for an accessible built environment came in 1970, with the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, which was only extended to include places of employment in 1976.
The Disabled Persons Act of 1981 sought to strengthen the application of this earlier legislation, but the result was patchy, and the designs of many buildings continued to pay little attention to the question of access.
Peter Murray, then editor of the RIBA Journal, pointed out that the addition of RIBA’s ramp was “fortuitous” timing, coinciding as it did with an invitation from the then-Prince of Wales to architects and planners to discuss how they could reduce the difficulties many disabled people faced accessing buildings.
Forty years later, there’s plenty of work still to do to make our headquarters truly accessible, but these images from the RIBA Collections offer a glimpse of how different generations have sought to leave the building more accessible than they found it.
Looking towards the future, we are making significant improvements to ensure 66 Portland Place is truly accessible, welcoming and inclusive, assisted by a dedicated access and inclusion consultant. Our proposals include removing revolving doors from our main entrance and creating a new fully accessible entrance along Weymouth Street, providing two step-free options for entering the building.
Inside, more spacious, efficient lifts in improved cores will be large enough to accommodate wheelchair users, ensuring that anyone can access all the building has to offer.
RIBA Books
Inclusion Emergency: Diversity in architecture
This is a call to action. Capturing insight and experiences from role models in architecture, this book provides a voice for the under-recognised to encourage understanding, reflection and meaningful change.
Are you an inclusive designer?
Despite improvements in the last 20 years we still have a long way to go before all of our buildings, places and spaces are easy and comfortable for all of us to use. This book puts forward a powerful case for a totally new attitude towards inclusivity and accessibility.
The Access Audit Handbook: An inclusive approach to auditing buildings
Well established as the best resource for conducting access audits, this book offers straightforward advice about undertaking access audits and explains how they make buildings, environments and services more inclusive.
The revised and updated version of the seminal Habinteg Housing Design Guide provides guidance on how to deliver accessible and inclusive housing that is flexible and adaptable to changing needs.
RIBAJ articles
Browse the below articles from the RIBA Journal looking at workplaces that have been adapted to be more inclusive and accessible.
New block accentuates senses at Heathlands school for deaf children
Learn how Manalo & White and Richard Lyndon Design emphasised sightlines, light, colour and even acoustics to create an enabling learning building that has brought a disused corner back into use for the school.
Robert Cox: When words felt unavailable, my drawings spoke volumes
Dyslexia has never felt like a weakness, says architect Robert Cox, who has found that being forced to express concepts more visually has proved something of a gift.
RNIB's new HQ becomes exemplar in designing for blind and neurodiverse people
Explore how Kay Elliott Architects and Buro Happold reworked the Royal National Institute of Blind People’s Grimaldi Building in King's Cross for inclusive access.
RIBA Library and Collections content
How today’s inclusive spaces can help solve 200 years of accessible design challenges
Ed Warner, Founder and CEO of the accessible design business Motionspot and Government Access Ambassador for Accessible Products and Spaces, looks at how modern day inclusive principles can help solve the decades of accessible design challenges evidenced in the collections.
All the books and journals are available to browse and read for free through the RIBA Library.
- ‘The Evolution of Universal Design: Accessibility to Empowerment’, Architect (Washington, DC), vol. 111 no. 8 (2022)
- Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
- Jos Boys, Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (Routledge, 2017)
- Jos Boys, Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/ability and Designing for Everyday Life (Routledge, 2014)
- Katelin Butler et al, ‘Designing for Dignity: Beyond Compliance, Towards Empathy’ Architecture Australia special issue, vol. 111 no. 2 (2022)
- Joachim Fischer and Philipp Meuser (ed.), Accessible Architecture: Age and Disability-Friendly Planning and Building in the 21st Century (DOM, 2009)
- David Gissen, The Architecture of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2023)
- David Gissen, ‘Disability and Preservation’, Future Anterior, vol. 16 no. 1 (2019)
- Alison Grant, Designing for Accessibility (3rd edition, RIBA Publishing, 2012)
- Rob Imrie, Accessible Housing: Quality, Disability, and Design (Routledge, 2006)
- Rob Imrie, Disability and The City: International Perspectives (Chapman, 1996)
- Wanda Katja Liebermann, ‘Teaching Embodiment: Disability, Subjectivity, and Architectural Education’, Journal of Architecture, vol. 24 no. 6 (2019)
- Sun-Young Park, ‘From Outcast to Citizen: Disability, Education, and Architecture in Postrevolutionary Paris’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 247 no. 15 (2020)
- Andrew Pearson, ‘A Question of Access’, Building Engineer, vol. 97 no. 3 (2022)
- Jack Rostron, ‘The Use of Planning Conditions, Agreements and Local Plan Policies to Improve Accessibility for People with Disabilities’, Journal of Planning & Environmental Law, vol. 12 (2021)
Check back throughout the month to view our latest articles, blogs and resources for UK Disability History Month, including the launch of our latest toolkit on understanding and preventing microaggressions in the workplace.
Upcoming events
J.E.D.I. Talk: Inclusive Design[ers]
22 January 2025: This event shines a light on the unique challenges these professionals face—not only in navigating the built environment but also in shaping it through their own work. Join us as our speakers share personal insights, discuss adaptive strategies, and reveal how accessibility and inclusivity can be prioritized in the design process.
Find out more about our other equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) resources and initiatives.
