"Children left feeling degraded": Lack of disabled changing facilities at popular beauty spot slammed

‘Either an early trip home or sitting in soiled pants’. That is the choice many parents of disabled children have to make when visiting the popular Pennington Flash.

The popular spot in Leigh is currently undertaking development work which will include accessible changing facilities, but this is not happening fast enough for one mum. Rebecca Callaghan, whose daughter has a rare neurological and skin disorder (Sturge Weber syndrome) believes that the cafe should not be built before proper changing facilities.

Matilda, 11, has a birthmark on her brain which has caused her learning difficulties and epilepsy as well as mobility issues for which she requires a specialist wheelchair.

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Tilly was also born with two holes in her heart and a pouch in her throat and has undergone over 30 operations before she was five-years-old, her first when she was just 24-hours-old.

Mum Rebecca lives close to the Flash, so has the luxury of going home to change her daughter, but she has experienced not having facilities elsewhere on trips that had to be cut short as a result. She does not want this to dissuade people from using the green space full of wildlife - which the 50-year-old highlighted as a brilliant space for her daughter and many others like her.

“I think it [the changing facility] should be in place before anything else and not in 2023,” the St Helens Road resident said. “It is just so degrading for all involved for them to be changed in the boot of the car.

“It is just not nice. The fact that a lot of places we visit don’t have these facilities is just ridiculous.

“It is almost