This Arts Council England (ACE) funded project centred on the creativity of disabled artists in enabling truly accessible practices for public venues and events, based on an already funded competition-winning project for co-creating equity in the public realm. By leveraging this existing initiative, the aim was to support and learn from providing good accessibility to artists and audiences and by increasing accessibility to the site through additional design interventions.

Following a series of participatory workshops that had explored the accessibility of the site – Postman’s Park in London’s Smithfield area – four new interventions were created by disabled artists and architects, in addition to the Seats at the Table installation. These were:

• Zoe Partington and Rubbena Aurangzeb-Tariq: the creation of a sensory landscape around the fountain at one end of the part, both to highlight its elements and to act as a orientation ‘turnaround’ point, to avoid the inaccessible exit at this end of the park.

• Mandy Redvers-Rowe and Poppy Levison: making the existing Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice more accessible through simple adaptations – an audio-description and BSL interpretation, available through a QR code, and a small ramp on and off the memorial platform.

• Jordan Whitewood-Neal and James Zatka-Haas with Rosie Scott and Giuseppe Ferrigno from Re-Fabricate: access information created both online in advance, and through signage across the site which aimed both to inform and provoke discussion.

• Raquel Meseguer Zafe and Helen Stratford: an intervention called ‘resting conversations’ that hosted quotes from people living with invisible disabilities & chronic illnesses, alongside gentle instructions that invite people to pause, rest & lie down.

In each case, the interventions also enabled experiential and discursive workshops for members of the public to share their experiences of living in an inaccessible world.

Seats at the Table - a collaboration between The DisOrdinary Architecture Project and Re-Fabricate for the London Festival of Architecture 2023 - offered a high-profile opportunity for disabled artists to lead on modelling best creative practice for site and event access and inclusion. By creating additional activities and design interventions out of lessons learnt from the LFA project, the additional Arts Council funding enabled disabled artists to engage directly with, and aim to effectively influence, built environment and cultural sector professionals; both at the Festival and beyond it.