Unlocking Festival Freedom: How Mobile Stair Lifts Can Transform Access for Wheelchair Users This Festival Season

Unlocking Festival Freedom: How Mobile Stair Lifts Can Transform Access for Wheelchair Users This Festival Season
By The Stair Climbing Company

As the summer festival season bursts into life across the UK, thousands of people are flocking to enjoy music, food, art, and culture in vibrant open-air settings. But while festivals promise freedom and joy, for many wheelchair users they remain sites of frustration and exclusion. Uneven ground, old buildings, and temporary structures like stages and portacabins often lack the access needed for full participation.

That’s where mobile stair lifts, also known as stair climbers, can make a real difference — and why The Stair Climbing Company, the UK’s leading authority on portable stair access, is urging organisers to take action now.

The Challenge: Hidden Barriers at Festivals

While many events now offer accessible toilets and viewing platforms, there are still frequent oversights when it comes to true inclusion. Backstage areas, heritage venues, and pop-up installations are often placed in or around buildings with steps — rendering them off-limits to wheelchair users. Even accessibility-focused events can overlook access to key areas like food stalls located up a few steps, meeting spaces in upper levels, or artist accommodation on uneven terrain.

And it’s not just the audience affected. Performers, volunteers, staff and stallholders using wheelchairs are regularly excluded from participating fully due to inaccessible stairways.

The Solution: Mobile Stair Lifts in Action

Mobile stair lifts — lightweight, battery-powered devices that can safely carry a wheelchair user up and down stairs — are a game changer for festivals.

Unlike permanent ramps or lifts, stair climbers can be deployed instantly, require no structural modifications, and are fully portable across different locations. This makes them ideal for festivals, where setups are temporary and varied.

The Stair Climbing Company provides state-of-the-art stair climbers that are:

• Versatile – Able to handle indoor or outdoor steps, straight or curved.
• Safe and tested – Fully compliant with UK safety regulations and CE certified.
• Operated by trained staff – Simple to use with guidance from a support team.
• Compact – Easily stored and transported on-site.

They offer a seamless solution to bridge the access gap without expensive infrastructure overhauls.

Enhancing Inclusion with The Stair Climbing Company

With over a decade of experience, The Stair Climbing Company has worked with venues, councils, and event organisers across the country to improve accessibility. Their clients include everything from theatres and schools to historic houses and music venues.

During festival season, the company offers both short-term rentals and on-site support packages that ensure stair climbers are available when and where they’re needed. Whether it’s helping an artist access the stage, enabling a wheelchair user to explore an art exhibit upstairs, or getting someone safely down into a riverside garden performance space — stair climbers offer dignity and choice.

Empowering Wheelchair Users

Wheelchair users frequently talk about the emotional cost of missing out. When steps block access, people are not only physically excluded but also socially and culturally marginalised. Festivals are about spontaneity, discovery, and shared experience. Mobile stair lifts restore that sense of freedom.

Users of stair climbers often report how powerful it feels to reclaim access to spaces others take for granted. They’re no longer left waiting for help or forced to use back entrances or complicated workarounds. Instead, they can move with confidence and equality.

Meeting Legal and Moral Obligations

Under the Equality Act 2010, event organisers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled guests. Mobile stair lifts represent a cost-effective and practical way to meet those obligations — and go beyond basic compliance to create truly welcoming spaces.

With increasing pressure on festivals to be inclusive, both from campaigners and audiences, the time to act is now. As public awareness around accessibility grows, so do expectations.

Choosing The Stair Climbing Company as a trusted partner sends a clear signal: this is an event that puts accessibility at its heart.

Real-World Impact: A Festival Transformed

At one recent cultural event, The Stair Climbing Company provided mobile stair lifts to help visitors explore a heritage-listed site with stunning rooftop views and several floors of interactive installations. Before stair climbers were introduced, wheelchair users were unable to reach these spaces. Once deployed, not only were guests able to enjoy the full experience, but one artist — a wheelchair user herself — was able to attend her own exhibition’s private view for the first time.

This isn’t just a story about equipment. It’s about enabling lives, opening up experiences, and ensuring that festivals live up to their promise of inclusion for all.

Conclusion: Making Festivals Accessible to All

As the UK festival scene continues to flourish, it’s essential that accessibility grows with it. No one should be left at the bottom of the stairs, missing out because of a few steps. With mobile stair lifts from The Stair Climbing Company, it’s possible to transform any venue, no matter how temporary, into a space of shared celebration.

This summer, let’s make sure that every guest, artist, and participant — regardless of mobility — can experience the joy, spontaneity, and creativity of the season. Let’s make access mobile.

Find out more about stair climbers and accessibility support at your event by visiting The Stair Climbing Company.