OBITUARY
Alan Benson, campaigner who founded Transport for All to improve wheelchair access
Campaigner whose experiences as a wheelchair user on London trains spurred him to found Transport for All to improve access
Alan Benson was aware that the Underground system was 150 years old and presented problems for disabled access, but insisted that “where there’s a will, there’s a way”
In the spring of 2012, as London prepared to host the Paralympic Games and its mayor Boris Johnson sought to present the city as one of the world’s most accessible capitals, Alan Benson found himself stranded in his wheelchair at a railway station in the southwest of the capital.
“I was waiting in the sunshine for a train at Strawberry Hill late one morning,” he recalled in a blog for his website Never a Dull Journey. “The train arrived, the guard failed to see me and the train left without me. I was livid.”
Benson, an economics graduate from Lincoln who had muscular dystrophy diagnosed at a young age, had moved to London a year earlier and found the transport system to be a Victorian