Surprisingly, typing the Unicode characters for accidental symbols does not produce the same font output as using the markup commands:
<< \new Staff { c'1^"B♭" c'1^"C♯" c'1^"D♮" } \new Staff { c'1^\markup { B \flat } c'1^\markup { C \sharp } c'1^\markup { D \natural } } >> And neither looks particularly great IMO.