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. My hypothesis questions whether the regeneration had had a positive impact on the area. Therefore the pedestrian count allowed me to compare where the more and less popular areas were and try to find reasons why this might be.
Before I carried out the survey I had to establish where I was going to carry them out. Because of the size of the study area this was carried out as a group to help save time. To ensure a wide range of accurate data for this survey, we tried to cover the largest area possible within the study area. Beforehand, we also had to work out where each of the 10 surveys were to be carried out. This involved looking at which areas were pedestrianised and if any roads were currently unsuitable for walking along i.e. if they had no pavements.
To carry this survey out properly, we stood at the previously arranged places at a pre-arranged time. This was to make sure that such things as rush hour or a lunch break did not bias some of the surveys. We then timed for 5 minutes and counted exactly how many people walked past the place that we stood. This would allow us to carry out the method efficiently for time. Each mark on the tally chart represents one person walking past. This was carried out on a number of streets and paths. These were: North Quay, Sutton Road, Vauxhall Street, Outside Barbican Leisure Park, Southside Street, Glassworks, Commercial Road, Mayflower Steps, National Marine Aquarium and Teats Hill.
On the following page is an example of the recording chart that each member of the group used to record the number of people in each place.
Traffic Count
We carried out a traffic count to work out what type of people were visiting different parts of the Barbican and Coxside areas. This was to try and help me answer my hypothesis of whether the regeneration of the area had had a positive impact. Discovering the types of traffic helped me to work out where the more popular areas were and why this might be.
Before this survey was carried out I had to decide on the different places that it we would do it to give a wide range of data. This was carried out as a group to save time and make it more efficient. Again we tried to cover a large area to gain as much data as possible. In advance we worked out where each of the group members were to carry out the survey and we planned to carry out each of the 10 surveys between a certain time to give a fair result. This time was between 12 noon and 12:30pm. Also, working out if roads were suitable for vehicles was important so that our study was performed correctly.
At the predetermined time we got into place and tallied how many vehicles passed us during the 5 minutes. We categorised the vehicles to help us work out what type of traffic it was. These categories were: Cars, Vans, Buses, Coaches, Lorries or Motorcycles. One vehicle is represented by one mark on the recording sheet. We carried out this experiment in 10 different places. These were: North Quay, Vauxhall Street, Sutton Road, Southside Street, Outside Barbican Leisure Park, Gashouse Lane, Commercial Road, Teats Hill, Clovelly Road and the B3240 next to Mayflower Steps.
An example of the recording sheet is below.
Questionnaire
This is probably the best way to understand what local residents and tourists think of the regeneration to the Sutton Harbour area. It allowed me to gain valuable opinions and collate the results from these to get the overall feeling for the area. It helped me to understand what areas of the development were a success and what, if any, still could be done to improve the area.
Before the trip to Sutton Harbour, I had to test a pilot questionnaire so that the real one would contain questions that were important and gave relevant information about the things I actually wanted to know. The pilot questionnaire allowed us to make mistakes and discover appropriate questions to ask. In my pilot questionnaire I included questions such as: ‘What is your purpose for visiting the Barbican today?’ I hoped that this would give me a good indication of the general purposes that the area was being used as. Another was: ‘How would you rate the overall cleanliness of the Barbican including litter and pollution.’ From this I wanted to find out the views on the maintenance of the area and if they thought there was a particular problem with litter or pollution. However after testing this question I feel that it was possibly too specific and didn’t really offer a detailed analysis of their views. For the pilot questionnaire I asked 3 people to just give a very brief idea of which questions were relevant.
The following gives reasons on why I asked each question and what I hoped it would tell me.
Question 1- “Are you local to the area of Plymouth?” From this I could distinguish how popular the area was with both local people and also how many tourists were in the area.
Question 2- (Visitors only) “Where have you come form to get here?” Asking this allowed me to work out the proportion of people coming from other areas and just which areas these were.
Question 3- “How did you travel here today?” – This is one of my contributions to the group questionnaire. This question allowed us to work out how accessible the Sutton harbour is and which, if any, methods are easier or more effective than others.
Question 4- a) (Car only) “Was their sufficient parking?” This was another of my contributions to the group. The question allowed us to work out if the regeneration had affected how much parking there was for cars. If not we could give an example of how the regeneration had had a negative impact on this aspect of the area.
b) (Public transport only) “How would you rate this public transport service?” This would let us know if the public transport in the area was not up to satisfactory standards.
c) (Walk and bike only) “Did you find that the Barbican area was well signposted?” From this we would know if the area was attracting the most number of people by various different methods. If it was not well signposted, the area potentially wasn’t attracting the full amount of people that it could do.
Question 5- “Why are you here?” This is another of my questions that the group used. It allows us to determine between what audience the area is attracting and work out if this is due to the recent regeneration.
Question 6- (Locals only) “How would you rate the regeneration of the Barbican as a whole?” This would give us an indication as to how the local people feel about it and whether they have been affected in a positive or negative way.
Question 7- “Do you think that there are a suitable amount of shopping stores and services in the area?” This question allowed us to work out if people were satisfied with the current range and availability of goods that locals and visitors would expect to see in the area.
Question 8- “How would you rate the condition of the roads and pavements in the Barbican area?” Although it may seem an odd question to ask, it is actually quite useful. Firstly it lets us know if, after building and restructuring work has been carried out, if the roads were left in an acceptable state. Also, even though a minor part of regeneration, well maintained surfaces keep up the good standard that an up-and-coming area would be expected to have.
Question 9- “How often do you visit the Barbican?” This question lets us know if people like to come back to the area regularly, and probably more importantly, if the Barbican is still attracting new tourists and visitors to the area.
Question 10- “What kind of improvements, if any, would you like to see made to this area? This was another question that I contributed to the group. It allows the person to give us any feedback on the overall conditions of the Barbican and in what areas they would like to see improvements made to make it more popular and effective.
A table of results for the questionnaire is given at the end of this section.
Environmental Survey
This method was designed to show my opinions on 10 different criteria of regeneration in the Sutton Harbour area. It would analyse what I thought on aspects of the area. I would rate each of these aspects from 1 to 5 with 1 being the lowest score and 5 the highest. I carried this survey out in 10 different places across the study area to give my opinions on Sutton Harbour as a whole.
Before the trip to the Barbican I had to decide on ten suitable criteria to rate it on. I had to choose criteria that would give me appropriate information that would help me to conclude whether my hypothesis is right or wrong. I opted on the following 10 criteria: Parking Facilities, Litter, Building, Road and Pavement Quality, General Public Facilities, Quality of Green Areas, Public Safety and the Quality of Views. I then had to describe how I would rate each one e.g. for the Building Quality criteria 1 would be poorly maintained and 5 would be well maintained. I did the same for each of the 10 criteria.
On the trip I chose 10 places to carry out each survey. I then surveyed the area looking for aspects that might raise or lower the rating level for each criteria. When I had decided on a suitable score for the criteria I marked it down in the corresponding box with a letter that would identify which area I was in. The 10 places in which I carried out this survey were: Commercial road, Discovery Wharf, Vauxhall Street, Barbican Parade, National Marine Aquarium, Mayflower Steps, Glassworks, Sutton Road, Barbican Car park on Coxside and in the Car park of Barbican Leisure Centre. The recording chart, which I used to mark the scores of each place, is shown on the next page with the key showing a letter used in the boxes that correspond with a place in the Sutton Harbour area.
Street Transect
I carried out a street transect on two varying streets in the area. It shows how each one is being used currently, who the streets and even particular shops are designed to attract and where smaller, but just as important details are used, such as benches, flower beds and bins. Each transect is drawn as accurately as possible trying to describe the usage of each shop or, in some cases, houses.
Before I carried out the transect, I went along each of the two streets and identified some of the objects that were for public use e.g. Post boxes, Parking spaces or Traffic lights. I designed a key so that I could make it quicker and easier when drawing the transects to show where each one goes and what type it is.
I started by drawing the road down the centre of my page. I then started on one side of the street and walked along describing the nature of each building and type of shop that occupied each space. This was done on both sides of the street, as well as looking out for any of the objects or safety procedures that were placed on the pavement or the edge of the road. Describing each shop allowed me to then state whether I thought it was designed to attract local people or tourists. I put an ‘L’ or a ‘T’ for which I thought was appropriate.
Shown below is the key that I designed beforehand to help me when drawing the street transects.
Photographs
Taking photographs as I walked around Sutton Harbour on the trip allowed me to capture images of views and objects that I thought were important to identify and be able to describe. Each one shows a different aspect of the Sutton Harbour regeneration, whether it was good or bad and it will now allow me to analyse it and come to a conclusion on whether my hypothesis is true or false.
On a previous visit to the area I had noticed some things that looked interesting and that would be good to annotate and show details of it. So on the actual trip I made sure that I took a photo of these things as well as other important buildings or objects e.g. a signpost that had previously read ‘Barbican Leisure Park’ but a local and very active member of the community had told us about her mission to get the Coxside area its name back after developers of the multi-story car park and leisure park had named them after the Barbican. So this lady, Ruby, had replaced the name Barbican on this signpost with her own ‘Coxside Leisure Park.’ I felt this was important to include in my work.
As I walked around the area carrying the other tasks that we had to complete to answer our hypothesis, I kept an eye out for interesting things to take a picture of. When I found a good place, I took the picture.
The picture of the ‘Coxside Leisure Park’ signpost is shown below.
Sketches
Sketches are much like the photographs. I chose to include a couple of hand drawn images so that it varied my sources of information.
There wasn’t really any planning to do for this method except when out and about carrying out other surveys, I made sure I was looking out for interesting views or buildings to sketch and later analyse.
When I found something that I thought would look good, I took a plain piece of paper and drew, fairly quickly but to the best of my ability, what I could see and a few of the details on and around it.
Interview
This gave me a very in depth conversation about how one person felt about the regeneration of Sutton Harbour. Our interview took place with Ruby, who has been campaigning against some aspects of the regeneration. It meant that we could ask various questions and get a comprehensive answer to which we could ask other things, these are things which the questionnaire didn’t allow us to do.
Before the interview could take place, Mr McGreal had to organise a meeting with Ruby. We also had to think if we had any questions that we would like to ask her.
Ruby talked to us about how the footbridge has affected her community. It means that late night drunks come down teats hill and expect to be able to use the footbridge to get to the Barbican. But it closes at night and this means that these people will now stay around Ruby’s community and cause havoc until late into the night. However closing the bridge has helped as it means that when clubs and bars chuck people out, they can’t get across and into Teats Hill. There was a large feeling that this is a two-sided argument with many good and bad points about the regeneration.
Originality
To show some originality in my section, I went back to the study area nearly two months later in different weather conditions to carry out a pedestrian and traffic count in the same 10 places as before. I hoped that this would give me a better idea of the amounts of people that use the area, at different times of the year and on different days.
When deciding on how to do this, I had to make a choice of some things that I would differ from the first counts, and some things that I would keep the same in order to analyse the data efficiently. I decided that I would change the day and carry out the surveys on a Saturday and obviously change the time of year, I therefore went back a two months later. But I decided to keep the time of day the same so that I could see what difference the month and day would make to the results.
All of the first set of pedestrian and traffic counts were carried out between 11am and 1pm. I therefore carried out all counts between these times to make the results fair. I went to each of the 10 different places that the pedestrian and traffic counts were carried out at, and timed myself for exactly five minutes to see how many vehicles or people travelled past each point. I tallied the results on the day, each mark representing one vehicle or person. The results of this are shown on the last page of the data presentation section.
Data Presentation
Data Interpretation
The most people were recorded around the Southside Street area of the Barbican. The levels decrease as you travel towards the Barbican Leisure Park. Southside Street had a recorded 40 pedestrians on it, whereas Vauxhall Street had just half of that at 20 people. Outside Vue cinema we recorded 15 people and one of the lowest counts was Teats Hill with just 10. These results are shown in the form of an isoline diagram in my data presentation.
Southside Street is one of the most tourist-orientated streets. This is shown on the street transect that I have produced of Southside Street. So it is therefore far more likely to attract more people than somewhere like Discovery Wharf wish is a very specialist area that would only attract the wealthier people who live in the modern hotel complexes in that area. Also Commercial Road is mainly houses and businesses that are designed to attract local people. This is shown on the second of my street transects showing the uses of each building in the street. Therefore less people will be recorded in this area.
The Glassworks was recorded as having the most pedestrians. It also had the lowest litter score out of 10 places and the lowest over-all bi-polar score. This is an indication that the environmental quality of this area is below average. Some of this information is shown on the proportional polygons that I produced of the bi-polar results in each area. This suggests that the more people, the more litter that is produced and the lower the environmental quality. This increase in litter shows that the regeneration of Sutton Harbour has had one negative impact on the environment.
Most of the places that were recorded as having low pedestrian counts were generally the places that had none or few tourist attractions. This shows that overall; the tourist-orientated areas are the most popular.
Artillery Flats, Gashouse Lane and Discovery Wharf were recorded as having a very low traffic count. In contrast to this, the Mayflower Steps, and even more so on Sutton Road, were recorded as having very high traffic counts.
Gashouse Lane has just 1 van over a five-minute period. This is 3 lower than Artillery Flats which had 4, and Discovery Wharf had 5 vehicles altogether. The higher scores of 46 at Mayflower Steps and 67 on Sutton Road show a major increase between areas. All of these results are shown on the divided bar chart, which shows road use of different vehicles around the Sutton Harbour area.
The most likely reason for Sutton Road having such large amounts of vehicles is that Sutton Road leads off of Exeter Street, which is one of the busiest roads into Plymouth Central Business District. This would explain why so many vehicles use it. It is also one of 2 main roads into the Coxside area. Coxside has quite a few industrial buildings, which could explain the large amount of vans and lorries that travel on Coxside roads. It has the Barbican Leisure Park, which would also attract visitors along Sutton Road.
This shows that both the Barbican and Coxside have good accessibility from the B3240 near the Mayflower Steps and along Sutton Road. This accessibility shows one way that the regeneration has had a positive impact on the area.
Overall in my environmental survey, Discovery Wharf had the highest score out of the 10 different places. The Barbican Parade was a close second. At the other end of the scale the Glassworks had the lowest total score with Commercial Road having just a few more.
In the different criteria, the amount and quality of green areas around the Sutton Harbour was the lowest scoring of just 3 at Barbican Car Park and Vauxhall Street. On the other hand, in general, the amount of traffic on this particular day was fairly low with four different places having a score of 5, indicating very little traffic. All of these results are shown on my proportional polygons, which show the results of my bi-polar survey.
One of the reasons that I think Discovery Wharf scored so high in this survey is because of the modern complexes that are sited here and the fantastic views over the marina. The amount of traffic is kept to a minimum due to the fact that it is a dead end road, with just a few car parking spaces. This means very little traffic is going to need to go down there. Also the paving quality was very high as it had been re-paved with an old-style cobbled street, adding to the effect of high standards in the area.
In contrast to this, Commercial Road scored quite low in the survey. There are a couple of reasons for this. The major one is that at the time of the survey, many of the houses had scaffolding outside them amongst builders’ rubble. This meant a particularly low score for building quality. Also, the views were quite poor here, as it is fairly built up with terraced houses and large industrial buildings running the length of the road on one side. The types of building are shown on the street transect for this road. These warehouses are a minor example of urban decay, showing a slightly poorer condition than the rest of the Sutton Harbour area. This is one area that has, for the moment at least, had a negative impact from the regeneration, although the scaffolding may be a good sign that something is being done about it.
From the questionnaire I carried out on the trip to Sutton Harbour, I found out that in general there was a wide range of reasons that people were in the area. Most people were either sight seeing or are a resident to the area. This shows that the area is still attracting tourists even on a weekday and that the area is a desirable place for people to live in. This could be interpreted that the regeneration has had a positive impact on the area. Only one person we asked was in the area for work. This could mean that the employment rate in the area is still very low, but I have to take into consideration the fact that the questionnaire may have been asked during most peoples work time, therefore less likely to be outside at this time. 9 people were in the area sight seeing and 6 were shopping. Out of 30 people asked, 7 of these were residents.
Also, when asked, the majority of people said that they would rate the regeneration as a 3 or 4 out of 5. Only 1 person said they would rate the regeneration as poor, the other 29 people rated it a 3 out of 5 or above. This means that the social impact has generally been good for the residents and tourists. These results are shown in the questionnaire that was carried out on the trip to the area.
These two facts together mean a lot for this study. It shows that regeneration has brought in tourists and people are spending their money in the area. This is very good for the economy as it shows an increase in product availability and that the area is becoming more attractive than before the regeneration started.
On the trip to Sutton Harbour, I took a quick sketch of the Barbican Leisure Park. This is shown in the data presentation section. It shows the Leisure Park as it is at the moment. Less than a decade ago, this was the derelict site of the old Plymouth Gasworks. But regeneration turned it around and developed it into a thriving leisure park for which thousands of people visit each year from around East Cornwall and West Devon.
The old fish market is now a modern glassworks, which is a great boost to the local economy. Just the look of it is far more appealing to tourists and potential residents alike. It is just the start of a massive project to turn the area around into a booming tourist area, yet still satisfy the needs and requirements of any residents to the area.
Quay Road is now a busy dining area of the Barbican with the traditional historic looks with a modern edge to it sited next to the marina. Evidence of this is shown in the form of a photograph in the data presentation.
All of these things have added to the affect of greatly improving the standard of the area, socially, economically and environmentally.
But there are still some areas that need assessing. For example, some of the roads on Coxside could be resurfaced just to give them a new look to go with the rest of the work that is being done. Also in some areas, litter was becoming a problem. This could be due to the increasing amounts of people that are visiting the area. The many food outlets in the Barbican area, where customers will be dropping litter, could also cause this and the businesses themselves will be putting out waste products into bins, but then seagulls will often turn this into a mess in the streets.
I think that overall, the regeneration of Sutton Harbour has had a positive impact, certainly on the economy, from all the new businesses that are benefiting from the increase in tourism and more residents. In many ways the environment has improved, although some areas still could be better. Finally, judging by the reaction of many tourists and locals, the regeneration has had a generally good impact on the social side of things as well.
Evaluation
My hypothesis stated that ‘Regeneration has had a positive impact on the Sutton Harbour area of Plymouth - its environment, residents and visitors.’ Having this set out in front of me definitely made my job easier than trying to start from scratch and investigate something without actually having a reason. It allowed me to stay on track and to not stray from the whole point of doing this investigation. And then having to keep referring back to the hypothesis just enforced the idea that I had a set objective and I must stick to it.
I feel that for both the pedestrian count and the traffic count, the time and day affected the result, probably more than any other method that I used. And even more than this, the weather played a huge part in exactly how many people were travelling through the Barbican on that day and it could have affected which transport people chose to take. It was really quite biased and to get a fair result from this, it would be wise to go back on different days, e.g. weekends and weekdays, at different times of year and different times of the day. This would have given a wider range of results to analyse and put together to get a better feeling for how accurate it really was. I also think that if the time at each place of recording was increased for each count, this could make the surveys a lot fairer.
Also, working in a group for this method could be very unfair because, for example, I cannot be certain that any one of my other group members carried out this method as accurately, or in the same way as me. Their timing may not have been exact, which on especially busy roads could make a big difference to the outcome. Also I can’t be sure that their counting was accurate. And likewise, they can’t be sure how well I carried out my surveys. So group work could have also affected the results of this.
My street transects are one of the things that far less likely to be affected by anything like before. It is a straightforward method of recording each building along the street. This may differ from one year to the next, but only very slightly. If I were to carry out these again next year, I would probably find that they are much the same apart from a few shops that may have changed function. One thing that could be seen as subjective is whether my idea of a tourist-orientated shop is the same as that to somebody else’s. On the street transect I marked for each shop whether I thought it was designed to attract visitors or local people. Some people’s views on this may differ from others, but I think that in general this is a fairly accurate method.
The bi-polar survey is probably most likely to be the one which could differ from person to person. It very much relies on what each individual would think for each criteria on the survey. For example, my idea of a lot of litter may be very different from that of somebody else’s. It could also be affected slightly by the time of day or year, but it wont make a huge difference if it were averaged out.
I feel that our questionnaire was fairly successful overall. There were some flaws in the method though. Firstly, although we were supposed to ask random people from around the area, we actually tended to ask elderly people and this is clear from the questionnaire results. So age could quite easily affect the fairness of our results because different age groups are likely to have different ideas about good and bad points about the regeneration.
Also the sample size could have been increased to give a wider range of views on the subjects that we were interested in finding out about. If we had time to ask another 20 people this would have given us almost double the amount of people and therefore a better idea of the views from residents and visitors.
Even though we carried out a pilot questionnaire to discover which of our questions were most successful, I still feel that some of the questions in the final one could have been modified to give us a better answer, or completely removed altogether and replaced with a more suitable question. For example, question 7 asked ‘Do you think that there are a suitable amount of shopping stores and services in the area?’ I think that this could have been phrased slightly better to make it clear to the participant exactly what we wanted to know. This is quite vague and does not specify exact information so this could have been misinterpreted by some and given us some unfair results.
I think that overall, my results are pretty much as accurate as we could make them. There may have been a minor counting error with vehicles or pedestrians, and different people will have different bi-polar scores for each place and each criteria. But I can be fairly confident that I can make a conclusion and that I can use the evidence I have collected to support my conclusion. As stated before, the time of day, and season could easily affect the results we take, and I proved that this is the case as I went back to each place and did pedestrian and vehicle counts, which differed quite a lot compared to the original results we obtained. However, if I relate this back to the hypothesis, both sets of results can be used equally as precise to reach a valid conclusion.
If somebody else had carried out this investigation, for example someone else in my class, I cannot be absolutely certain that they will come up with the same results as me. However, they would be able to see clearly that the Sutton Harbour area has improved enough to say that the hypothesis is correct that the regeneration has had a positive impact. So, from this I would say that my conclusion is almost certainly applicable to the study that I carried out.