Do you know about Changing Places? Ben can’t use a standard accessible toilet so when are we are away from our house we need a Changing Place which is a room with a changing bench, a hoist and room for us and his wheelchair. Without a room like this, our options for visiting places are limited.

Many of our favourite places to visit in London have taken it upon themselves to install Changing Places: Tate Modern, Barbican, Royal Festival Hall. They have just opened a new one at City Hall, and there’s one in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Yet other places have so far been apparently incapable of finding the space, funding or enthusiasm to install one. Between the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum there are no facilities to cater to any of their more disabled visitors despite the thousands that must visit every year. The museums are next to each other in Kensington – it would be easy for disabled visitors to move from one museum to the other to find the facilities they need but according to the Changing Places map it is a barren wasteland.

This means that when we visit one of these museums, which we do often, our day is determined by how long it is reasonable to stay out before we need to return home. It doesn’t matter how much fun we are having, how interested Ben is in nocturnal creatures or how much Max doesn’t want to leave Wonderlab. We have to leave and drive home because there is no toilet within two miles for Ben to use.

Let’s just think for a second about using the loo, or rather not being able to use the loo. I’m a woman so I’m used to queueing, but I know there’s going to somewhere I can use pretty much everywhere. I drink a lot of tea and water, I’ve had three kids, I wee a lot. Just imagine not being able to go to the loo, restricting fluids and organising your whole day, life, around where there might be a loo. People like Ben have to tolerate a certain amount of discomfort to get to see more of a museum.

During the recent anniversary of the moon landings I read a fascinating Twitter thread about peeing in space. The author, a science fiction writer, points out that it is a common misconception that women couldn’t go into space initially because they lacked the technology for them to pee. Actually, the technology for anyone to pee in space was untested and initial space flights involved a lot of men weeing in their spacesuits and capsules smelling of poo. By the time women were going into space, NASA developed a solution for launch and spacewalks called the Maximum Absorbency Garment (MAG) which was, essentially, a large nappy or pad. Men used them too because they were more comfortable and involved less pee floating around the cabin.

It is super cool that the Science Museum is giving it’s disabled visitors a genuine space experience by leaving them to sit in a MAG while admiring a lunar module, but it would be better to have proper facilities. At the cutting edge of human endeavour, forty years ago, it seemed reasonable for astronauts to wear pads for long periods of time. On a Tuesday morning in the school holidays, in 2019, it does not seem reasonable. It appears that public institutions in central London don’t care enough about their disabled visitors to provide for them.

Presumably at the heart of this is people’s incapacity to imagine what they have not experienced. As a Continence Nurse said to me recently, ‘If I could persuade NHS managers to experience what my patients do, they might provide more for my patients and install Changing Places in hospitals’. Imagine the results we might have if MPs or Museum Directors got the full MAG experience.

Over the last few months I contacted the South Kensington museums about this issue. The V&A and Natural History Museums told me they have hopeful plans to install Changing Places in 2020. In the meantime the Natural History Museum says it can provide a mobile Changing Place on request. That doesn’t allow for a great deal of spontaneity, as it means we need to plan trips sufficiently in advance, but it is a good interim solution. The Science Museum hasn’t yet responded.

The Changing Places campaign estimates there are quarter of a million people in the UK who have some kind of disability and cannot use a standard accessible toilet. Yet there is no requirement for public buildings, old or new, to install Changing Places.

Thousands of people are living their lives constrained or in discomfort due to a lack of loos they can use. Surely if we can get people into space we could provide a few more specialised loos on earth?