Billingham offers quite a lot of services. It has a variety of shops including a chemists, banks and building societies, high street names such as Boots, Woolworths, Argos, Thorntons and Asdas although Asdas is small and the town centre in general is poor compared with today’s standards of high streets.
The centre has been criticized for the number of charity shops in recent years. The Forum is the main features of the centre the centre and has been for nearly forty years. There is a swimming pool, an Ice rink, which has recently been revamped to Olympic standard, a theatre, a five-a-side sports hall, rock climbing, a gym and a squash courts. As it is forty years old, plans are a foot to build a new sports complex across the road on John Whitehead Park and a Morrisons superstore to be built on the site of the Forum. Dunns store site has been sold off to Tesco who are going to build a superstore with a Tesco garage. This creates new jobs for the area.
The two areas I have decided to investigate are the Pentland Avenuearea as my inner city area and Low Grange Avenue area as my suburban area.
The Pentland Avenue Area was built between the 1940’s and the 1950’s and the housing takes on the typical characteristics of that time, terraced housing in quite high density, or semi-detached housing with bay windows and small gardens. If the houses have garages they were built some years after the actual house and most garages and drives were often shared. This area fits the hypothesis because it is located right next to the CBD in Billingham. Low Grange Avenue was built between the mid 1970’s to the early 1990’s. The housing consists of mainly detached and semi-detached housing with quite a few bungalows. Almost all the houses have garages and drives, in some cases a double garage. Gardens are large with both front and back sections. This area fits the hypothesis because it is located away from the CBD of Billingham, on the outskirts of the town.
In each area I have chosen five sample point roads to gather results from and I have made sure they are of good geographical location, so I get a fair set of results. They were picked randomly from the area and I have chosen to do this I would get a good overall view of the areas, which is important to get fair results.
I have devised a number of methods to enable me to answer the hypothesis. These methods are a photograph, environmental index recording sheet, a noise pollution survey, traffic and pedestrian survey, a questionnaire and a graph from the results. I will take photographs at each sample point to evidence things I have written up in the sample point descriptions. I will also annotate important things that I can see on the photos. The environmental index-recording sheet involves me picking a 100m stretch of road at each sample point and examining the following areas for:
. The state of paving and roads
. The amount of litter
. Whether of not there is any dereliction
. The condition of street furniture (e.g. street signs)
. The amount of wirescape (e.g. satellite dishes, aerials and telephone wires)
. Is there any advertisement
. The condition of the landscape and vegetation
. How safe are the roads
. The condition of housing
. The general house keeping
For each of these ten roads I must give a mark out of 5 with 1 being poor and 5 being excellent. The noise pollution survey consists of 5 different levels of noise with 1 being very noisy to 5 being very quiet. The traffic and pedestrian survey involves six forms of transport and pedestrians. I will spend 15 minutes at each sample point and construct a tally chart of results from the amount of traffic that passed by in that time. The questionnaire is constructed of eight questions that I will ask ten residents or people visiting the area, in each area, picking some from each sample point if possible. There will be separate questionnaires for both Pentland Avenue area and the Low Grange Avenue area, although they will have the same questions. I have decided to compos a questionnaire to get a view of what other people thought of the area where I interviewed them weather it was in the inner city area or the suburban area.
However there are some limitations to my methods. The scores I will give out on the environmental index recording sheets may be biased towards the biased towards the suburban area, as I happen to live in that area of Billingham. It would have be better if I had somebody to work with who lived in the inner city area, however I decided to work alone. The totals from my pedestrian and traffic survey will only shows results from one time of the day, so I don’t get a clear view of the volume of traffic. Maybe I should pick a few times in the day to get more information and then I could compare results, but this is very time consuming and inconvenient. I don’t have a decibel meter so I can’t gauge accurate sound levels. So I consider to be load may not seem so load to someone else who lives in a loader environment, so that will be another limitation of my methods.
My prediction is that the suburban area will score higher on the environmental recording-index and a have better standards of living than the inner city area. This will prove the original hypothesis correct.