Disabled Motoring UK - Disabled Motoring UK is the charity for disabled drivers, passengers & Blue Badge holders.

Charlotte Smith, 26, shares her passion for dog agility.

All of my life the two things I have been most passionate about are animals and art. I studied art and graphic design when I was in college and have always had a pet of one sort or another since I was young. In my teens I was a keen horse rider. I had a pony which I would ride every day and take to competitions at the weekends. Continue reading »

Mobilise member Fred Walden is a regular visitor to London. He tells us about three of his favourite accessible hotels.

Copthorne Tara Hotel, Kensington

Over the last twenty years I have stayed many times at the London Tara Hotel in Kensington and booked one of their adapted rooms. The Tara was one of the first hotels in London to properly cater for visitors with disabilities and they have adapted around a dozen rooms on their Mezzanine floor by fitting roll-in showers, ceiling hoists, automatic doors and special furniture. Continue reading »

Suselle Boffey  tells us about her early adventures with her mother, who inspired Suselle’s lifelong love of travel.

My mother was quite an unusual person.  From an early age, she bucked the trend – a trait she probably inherited from her father, who chose to follow a professional career and so alienated his family of traditional Jewish business-people.  Mum’s own mother was absent for most of Mum’s life (she was sent to a distant psychiatric hospital when Mum was seven years old). As a result, Mum’s upbringing was left to her dad and the housekeeper. Perhaps it’s not surprising that she followed her own thoughts and ideas as she grew up, developing an enquiring mind and a passionate curiosity about the world.  Even in the early 1950s – still a period when convention and tradition ruled, she chose to go into nursing and to hitchhike across France and Germany with her nursing friends! Continue reading »

When his mental and physical health deteriorated leaving Daniel Anderson-McIntyre disabled, he encountered some very different attitudes among employers. Not all were positive. He tells Mobilise his story.

In 2006, at the age of 29, I became disabled.  This wasn’t just an overnight thing but was gradual over several months and I believe, looking back, had been going on for a number of years beforehand.

My disability consists of a mental illness, known as Conversion Disorder, which causes me several physical and mental disabilities.  I have difficulty for example with walking, often using my wheelchair or crutches to get around.  Among the more “invisible” problems are my poor memory and lack of ability to concentrate for long periods of time. Continue reading »

UPDATE: For information on the memorial tribute to O A Denly, please click here.

It is with great sadness that Mobilise has to announce the death of our founder and president, Oswald Arthur Denly, known to many of us as “Denny”. He died at the age of 86.

O A Denly was born in 1924 in London, and entered the Royal Navy in 1942. He contracted polio whilst in Ceylon and returned to the UK in 1945. Paralysed from the waist down, he was invalided out of the navy and became a hospital administrator. The expectation of many might have been that Denny’s adventuring days were firmly behind him, but the handsome 22-year old thought differently. He had planned to spend his first Foreign Service leave in Switzerland and saw no reason to change his plans despite his disability. In June 1947 he set off to conquer the Alps in his 147cc petrol-driven Argson tricycle, or “Invalid Carriage”. His was to take him 1,500 miles over the Alps, including a climb of almost 8,000 feet through steep mountain passes. Continue reading »