More Background Information
The Trafford Centre was conceived in 1984. Planning permission was sought in 1986 and the approval was finally upheld by the House of Lords in 1995. It took 27 months to build and was opened on September 10th 1998.
The Trafford Centre catchment area is larger and more populous than any other regional shopping centre in the UK and comprises 5.3 million people within a 45-minute drive-time band, with a total potential retail expenditure
of £13 billion. There are 10,000 free parking spaces, 280 stores, five nationally renowned anchor stores, and Europe’s largest food court with seating for 1600, 36 restaurants providing 6000 covers, a 20-screen cinema and an entertainment venue called Namco containing an 18-lane bowling alley. Therefore The Trafford Centre needed many employees. So 7,000 people, including 380 Trafford Centre staff were employed. This would have reduced the percentage of unemployment in Manchester slightly.
It is located approximately 9km to the west of Manchester city centre, close to junctions 9 and 10 on the M60 (formerly M63), with convenient access to the M602 via Centenary Bridge and an excellent dual carriageway link to the city centre.
The Trafford Centre currently attracts 24 million visits annually with an average weekly footfall of 465,000.
HYPOTHESIS 1
Hypothesis one is, there are a broad variety of retail outlets within the Trafford Centre.
To answer this hypothesis, a landuse survey was carried out to determine the range of retail outlets found in the Trafford Centre. Once the fieldwork was completed, the results are displayed using a landuse map and a range of graphs shown below.
This pie chart gives information on the number of the different varieties of shops. It shows the quantity of the different types of shops in the Trafford Centre and the percentage of the number of type is also shown on the pie chart. Below is a table to represent the number of the different types of shops.
As shown in the pie-chart above, the widest variety of shops in the Trafford Centre are ladieswear stores at 21%, but followed closely by shops in the “other” category.
It is shown that the Trafford Centre therefore has a wider variety of specialist shops than in CBDs for example. Many of these specialist shops are located in Festival Village. Others are spread throughout both floors of the Trafford Centre evenly.
Many of these shops classed as “other” shops are located near the ladieswear stores to create more business and profits for themselves. So more women will pass these shops and be interested in looking in them and maybe even purchase some goods. A higher percentage of shoppers in the Trafford Centre are women, and a lower percentage of shoppers are male.
It is a fact that more women enjoy shopping (mainly for clothes) than men. So as a result there are more ladieswear stores than there are menswear shops. There is in-fact a difference of the ladieswear stores having 25 more stores than menswear stores. That’s an 8% difference.
The reason for this difference is women prefer to purchase more high order convenience goods. So to forfill their needs and requirements, the Trafford Centre made sure they had more of these shops.
Although the ladieswear stores are evenly spread throughout the Trafford Centre on both floors, they are slightly categorised. By this what is meant is that many of the high street stores are separated from the non-high street shops. Examples of high street stores are HMV, TopShop/ TopMan, Select and Bay Trading. The majority of these are located on Peel Avenue. Examples of stores that aren’t often found on the high street are Miss Sixty, Morgan, The Disney Store and Mish Mash. Most of these shops are located on Regent Cresent.
I have also noticed a pattern in the location of the sports shops and shoe stores. They are both usually located quite near to one-another. This may be because shoe stores also sell trainers which are also a part of sportswear. So the two types of stores go together relatively well in my opinion.
All the cafes and restaurants are not spread out throughout the centre. They are all put into a part of The Trafford Centre called The Orient. The Trafford Centre has Europe’s largest food court with seating for 1600, 36 restaurants providing 6000 covers.
Conclusion
The hypothesis is correct. It is true there are a broad variety of retail outlets within the Trafford Centre. The evidence of this is shown in the text above and also in the graph and chart above. There are a variety of both high street shops and specialist or non high street stores in The Trafford Centre. The Trafford Centre attracts around 30 million visits annually so this is more evidence of that The Trafford Centre has a broad variety of retail outlets otherwise they wouldn’t have so many people visiting it.
HYPOTHESIS 2
Hypothesis 2 is pedestrian numbers vary within the Trafford Centre depending on location and time of day.
Pedestrian counts were conducted at a number of locations and were done at 11.30am and 1.30pm. The results were all recorded on an appropriate sheet. When the fieldwork was completed, the information was represented using pedestrian flow charts.
This bar chart shows the information from the table represented in the form of a graph. This is the field work that we did during our visit to the Trafford Centre. We split off into pairs and were given different locations of the Trafford Centre to go to at the times of 11.30am and 1.30pm and count the number of visitors we saw walking past, using a tally chart at the time.
The location points and more results are shown in a land-use survey shown on a separate page.
As you can see from the graph, there is a trend in the data. The red bars represent the number of visitors at 11.30am and the orange bars represent the number of visitors at 1.30pm. The trend I see from this is that all of the counted visitors in each location at 1.30pm were higher than that of 11.30am, with the exception of location 12, which says they counted more visitors in the morning than afternoon.
I believe I have found the reasons for this trend. The first reason is in the afternoon the counts are higher because that is the time when many people will have been looking for café’s and restaurants to eat in because it’s the time many call lunch-time. So the customers will have been travelling from all parts of the Trafford Centre to eat. Also many of the employees will have added to the numbers of visitors crossing these locations to find and receive their lunch. You must remember that the Trafford Centre employs 7000 staff so that gives an even more dramatic effect on the difference of results.
My second reason for the difference in results of the two different times the results were recorded is that many of the shoppers will have newly arrived to The Trafford Centre in the afternoon (at 1.30pm).
There is a reason for the difference of numbers in the different locations because of the types of shops surrounding the location and if there are escalators nearby or if there are cafés or restaurants also nearby. All of these factors increase the amount of visitors passing by the location. Therefore this doesn’t make the results all vaguely the same.
For example if the location of your visitor count is near many ladieswear shops like location 1, then the probability will be higher that more visitors will go to that part of the store, unlike location 11 which had a low number of visitors because it is located near a load of children’s facilities, e.g. crèche.
Conclusion
I have proved that hypothesis 2 is also true, that the pedestrian numbers vary within the Trafford Centre depending on location and time of day. This is proven by the text above, the graph, tables and the sheet with the land use survey shown on a separate page.
HYPOTHESIS 3
Hypothesis 3 is environmental quality is high throughout the Trafford Centre
An environmental quality survey was completed in order to address the hypothesis. The results are represented by means of a bi-polar analysis.