Some of the most intriguing items in the Jean Stone Collection are the photographs of wheelchairs. Not athletes on podiums. Not the medal ceremonies or opening spectacles. Just wheelchairs close-up, carefully framed and considered.

Whether Jean took these photographs herself or whether they were shared with her by colleagues and athletes over the years, we cannot say with certainty. What we can say is that she kept them, curated them and preserved them alongside everything else in her collection. And that, in itself, tells us something about her.

There are dozens of them, spanning decades and continents. Some are action shots: hands gripping chrome rims, wheels blurred with movement, unidentifiable athletes leaning hard into competition at events from Stoke Mandeville to Seoul.

Others are more contemplative; a lone chair propped against a dark wooden wall; another sitting empty in the foreground with a crowd of picnickers behind. Taken together, they form a visual essay on the evolution of wheelchair design from the heavy, institutional chairs of the 1960s to the lightweight, precision-engineered sports chairs of the 1980s and beyond.

But the collection's engagement with access and inclusion extends well beyond the chairs themselves. Wherever Jean's work took her (Seoul, Barcelona, Lillehammer, Hong Kong, West Berlin, Malaysia and more) photographs found their way into her collection that documented not only the sport but the infrastructure around it. A bilingual directional signpost at the Seoul 1988 Paralympic Games, its Korean and English text pointing to the Main Stadium and Indoor Swimming Pool, framed against pink cherry blossom. A wheelchair user giving a jubilant thumbs-up from inside a hot air balloon basket. Ramps, rails, entrances, the practical architecture of inclusion, noticed and recorded.

It is impossible to look at these images without thinking about Jean's background as an occupational therapist. Her profession gave her a particular way of seeing, one instinctively alert to the relationship between people and the physical environments they moved through. Long before accessibility was on the public agenda, Jean understood its importance at a deeply practical level. Whether she was behind the camera or simply chose to keep what others had captured, the photographs in her collection reflect that understanding clearly.

Together, they are something more than a personal archive. They are a record of a world slowly, imperfectly learning to make space for disabled people and preserved by a woman who spent her life making sure that space existed.

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The Jean Stone Collection has now been catalogued and will soon be searchable via the Buckinghamshire Archives Disability Sports Catalogue.