by editor Leo Whitlock
lwhitlock@thekmgroup.co.uk

our make it family friendly campaign is demanding:

- the city council and canterbury city partnership bosses meet mums and listen to their views.
- for them both to devise a strategy to improve the experience of mums with babies and small children shopping in canterbury.
- for businesses in the city to provide easily accessible, clean, well equipped breast-feeding facilities.
- for the city council and the canterbury city partnership to promote those facilities that are up to scratch.

We want the historic city of Canterbury to succeed in the modern age and that means welcoming families, especially those with babies and very small children, with open arms.

And evidence is mounting that the city is falling short.

Last week young mum Louise Dancy told how she was shown into a broom cupboard in one shop and a darkened room in another.

Mothers on this week’s Gazette letters page relay similar experiences, such as sitting on the dirty floor of the baby changing room in Whitefriars with the toilet and dirty nappy bin in full view to feed their babies, or the lack of a chair at the baby changing facilities in the new Waitrose making feeding impossible.

We are calling on Canterbury City Council, the Canterbury City Partnership and the shops, restaurants and cafes it represents to work with mums to make shopping in the city a pleasurable and stress-free experience.

If they do not, families will start to use their spending power elsewhere.

Like it or not, shops here are competing with centres like Bluewater, less than an hour up the M2, where the facilities are out of this world.

There are lots of them and they are designed with the mums of small babies in mind.

There is no need for a key or a long wait for an attendant, they are clean, well equipped and easy to use.

Being family friendly does not stop there. The council’s public conveniences are not exactly convenient for mums with babies.

Council car parks do not offer parent-and-baby parking spaces where there is a little more room to put up your pushchair and get your baby out of their car seat safely.

The spaces in Whitefriars are so tightly packed together that it is hard to pick up your baby out of the back seat without your car door hitting whoever is parked next you.

The powers-that-be need to walk around the city with a new mum and see the world through their eyes.

See this week's Gazette for full report and reaction.