As a father of two daughters (4 years and 11 months), writes Alasdair Shaw, I have got a good idea about which places locally are suitable for taking a pushchair and which aren’t. However I have been caught out when outside my local patch. It also occurred to me that new parents, or just parents new to the area, would benefit from easily being able to look up whether a place was pushchair friendly.
And so I started PushFriendly. This is a website http://www.pushfriendly.org.uk where parents can view the ratings for places and add their own. The categories for ratings are access, changing facilities, feel/service and extras. For those places which have a cafe there is also a category for highchairs.
Places which score at least ‘acceptable’ on all relevant categories are awarded a PushFriendly badge. Places which score ‘good’ on the majority of categories and no ‘poor’ are awarded a PushChampion badge. Soon I will be sending the first batch of certificates to those places so they can display them.
The other aspect of PushFriendly is a forum where people can share walks that are suitable for pushchairs. The first I put on was around Wellington and Rockwell Green visiting the Basins, Park and two playgrounds.