Regeneration has had a positive impact on the Sutton Harbour area - its environment, residents and visitors. Discuss

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Regeneration has had a positive impact

on the Sutton Harbour area –

its environment, residents and visitors

    I am investigating this topic because, as a class, we have studied the inner city areas of MEDC’s. We have looked at some of the problems and considered how regeneration may help to solve some of them.

    Today, about 70% of the UK’s population live in the city. This can lead to many problems, such as overcrowding, an increase in health and sanitation problems and much competition between businesses within a city and also between different cities that are trying to attract potential investors into the city.

    Trying to create a balance between the essential and desirable things in a city is hard to achieve when trying to keep both the residents and the city council happy. This is a problem that the Sutton Harbour area has had to try and overcome by using regeneration to make the place more attractive to businesses and tourists to help the council have a higher income, but also to suit the current residents.

    I will look at just how successful the regeneration of Sutton Harbour has been and find out the views of the people that have to live their, and why tourists were attracted to the area.

Background to Area

The early site of Plymouth is the Sutton Harbour area. A castle was built on near next to the harbour, which enabled Plymouth to have an essential function in governing the English Channel. The name ‘Barbican’ comes from the name for an outer defence of a castle, and the name has now been allocated to the whole of the Harbour.

    The Barbican and Coxside areas soon became central industrial and residential areas in the inner city at the start of the 20th Century. At its height, Sutton Harbour was the hustle and bustle of a typical busy and successful fish harbour. The marina was surrounded with many different business like the fish market on the edge of the harbour which opened in 1896. There were boats being repaired and built.

    But drastic regeneration was called for when the employment rate and population of Sutton Harbour reached an all time low. The graph below shows the population between 1901 and 2001 and the employment between 1931 and 2001. Until the last 10 years Sutton Harbour was looking like going into a complete decline.

There are many reasons why the area went into decline. The first is that shipbuilding in other ports was becoming far more competitive. The government also cut the spending on defence so less money was coming into the area to support their trade.

    Also as other ports and industries became more efficient, Plymouth became less and less reliable because it was far away from most major cities and not very easy to access as the closest motorway is in Exeter. So trade was lost and the fishing soon came under threat from more successful ports that had better facilities. And with the loss of trade and fishing, the coal depot on Coxside was forced to close due to lack of demand. This in turn meant that the gasworks regular and reliable supply of coal was cut off and also closed down.

    As a result of all the businesses and trades going into decline, the area soon became for less attractive to prospective buyers and organisations to invest their money into the area. It meant that a speedy downward spiral developed, and the area looked like a lost cause.

    In 1993 Sutton Harbour Company changed how the area was being seen and set about to make it look like a successful and busy harbour. They built the lock, which now meant that the harbour was accessible by boat 24 hours a day, whereas before it was just at high tide. There were now also many disused warehouses and derelict land areas that had massive potential to change the area around.

    A substantial asset to the area came in the form of the National Marine Aquarium, at a cost of £12 million the Harbour started to bring in the important visitors and tourists, which in turn led to the rise in the economy. The area now had advertised just how big it was becoming and that it was soon to be a high profile, up-market area of the country.

    The fish market was resited and this helped it to become one of the best in the country once again. This created about 500 jobs.

    These things, amongst the building of modern, luxury accommodation, the free space that was created around the area became more enviable at just 10 minutes from the Central business District and the creation of Barbican Glass, meant that the City Council now had a larger income that could be spent on regenerating the area further. This was spent on new parking facilities for the increasing amount of visitors, the Mayflower Steps were opened up and small changes were made to the buildings and paving, but mad it far more attractive.

    And now, there is a visible change to the whole look and feel to the area, which brings in about 3 million tourists annually.

Methods Identified

Whilst on my trip to Plymouth, I will need to carry out methods that will aid me in reaching a conclusion about whether my hypothesis is right or wrong.

    I will do a tally chart to measure the amount of traffic and pedestrians passing a certain place. This will help me to understand if the regeneration so far has attracted visitors and provided more jobs, and if so, where the most popular places of Sutton Harbour are. I will carry this out in 10 different places in the area.

    Again, I will tally the results to my questionnaire that has been designed to find out what local people and visitors think of the regeneration of Sutton Harbour, and what they think the most successful parts of it are at the moment.

    I will carry out a bi-polar survey to show my particular opinions on different aspects of the Sutton Harbour area. I will rate each criteria on a scale of 1-5 on how well I think each one performs in 10 different places. It will analyse things like the litter, traffic, amount of green areas and building quality.

    I will also produce a street transect of two streets in the area to show their exact use and who they are designed to attract. It will show other details like any post boxes, traffic lights or benches.

    Finally I will take photographs and produce two sketches around the area to show some aspects that I think are interesting and show significant signs of improvement to the area due to regeneration.

Final Paragraph

    With the data I have collected I will produce a bar chart to show the results of my bi-polar environmental survey. This will collate my results and help me to analyse the data.

    Looking at the results of the pedestrian and traffic count I will be able to tell how successful the regeneration project has been by how busy each place is. In some cases, e.g. North Quay, there need not be copious amounts of pedestrians, because that means they may have been successful at creating a reasonably quiet residential area that is peaceful.

    Taking the results from my questionnaire I will be able to look at the opinions of other people, both visitors and residents, and how they feel about the regeneration of the area and if it relates back to my hypothesis of whether it has had a positive impact.

    Using my photographs and sketches, I will be able to annotate each and criticise or complement different aspects from each position. This will help me to understand what things, if any, could still be done to improve the area.

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Methodology

This table shows the different methods we used on the trip and the relevant information about each. They will all help us to come to a decision if our hypothesis is true or false.

Pedestrian Count

    I carried out a pedestrian count so that I could determine how many people were visiting certain areas around the Barbican and Coxside areas. ...

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