Technology has improved since the 50s and in the last five or six years especially, there has been a lot of progress. But the world is still too often designed without wheelchair users in mind

A lot has changed for people with disabilities since the 1950s, when the then seven-year-old Alice Moira was given her first wheelchair – not least the fact that it was made of wood and she couldn’t push it herself. Technology has come on in leaps and bounds, of course, as has society’s understanding of disability, while moves towards flexible working have, in some ways, made things easier. But wheelchair users still face challenges in a world that, so often, has been designed without them in mind. Recent plans to make cuts to disability benefits in the UK have raised concerns that disability rights might be retreating. Thirty years on from the UK’s Disability Discrimination Act becoming law, Moira, now 81, chats to 25-year-old Lochlann O’Higgins about what their experiences of using a wheelchair have had in common – and how they differ.

Do you remember the first time you used a wheelchair?
Lochlann O’Higgins: No, I was two. My parents told me about it, though. I have brittle bone disease, so I used to break my bones a lot and I couldn’t walk. In the hospital, the first time I got in a wheelchair, I apparently just jumped in it and started wheeling up and down the corridor, having the best time of my life because I was able to move around freely for the first time. The nurses and my mum were scared I was going to crash into a wall.

Far-right rhetoric fuelled rioting here in 2024, but Back on the Map is helping to unite the community, through good accommodation, new shops, and an aim to genuinely uplift and improve people’s lives
• Donate to the Guardian Charity Appeal 2025 here
• Communities are our defence against hatred. Now, more than ever, we must invest in hope

When 47-year-old shop assistant Claire Carter was younger, her mother told her to “never live on the long streets” – terrace-lined roads about half a mile long that lead from the centre of Hendon, Sunderland, to the sea. These six streets have a reputation for being “full of wrong ’uns, full of stolen cars, places getting smashed up”, she says. Close by is Fletcher’s News & Booze, the shop where Tommy Robinson hosted a book signing in 2017 that ended in physical fights and 21 arrests.

Sunderland more widely has been a key site for far-right politics: in 2024 violent anti-Muslim riots broke out after misinformation spread on social media, suggesting that the man behind fatal stabbings at a children’s dance class in Southport was an illegal migrant. About 500 people came to Sunderland’s city centre to a protest that quickly descended into what a judge has since described as “an orgy of mindless destruction, violence and disorder”, with rioters setting a car on fire, shouting Islamophobic chants and throwing stones at the police.

Parcels worth £666.5m have been stolen in the UK this year, though some pranksters have found ways to give culprits their comeuppance. With Christmas deliveries arriving thick and fast, here are practical steps to take

A couple of years ago, 31-year-old charity worker Nicki Wedgwood had ordered Christmas presents online for friends and family. When the packages were delivered to her in Hackney, east London, the driver left them in the lobby of her building rather than taking them directly to her flat. She spotted them as she popped out to a nearby shop and decided to pick them up when she came back. When she returned 10 minutes later, the boxes had been ripped open and their contents were gone.

Wedgwood thinks she passed the thief in the hallway as she was leaving for the shop. “There was some random dude just inside the doorway, who had a Boris bike with him,” she says. She had assumed he was a guest of one of her neighbours. “I said hello to him … I think he even said Merry Christmas.”