The theory of aging population,
Bridlington being a seaside resort is now becoming a rare commodity. The number of seaside resorts has decreased over the last 50 years. This could be directly linked to the war. During the war many people could not afford foreign travel. This obviously led to the increase in popularity of places to visit within the UK.
Connecting this to the increasing elderly population is easy. During the war many people might have moved out of the cities into small towns by the sea. After the war they may have stayed because it’s so attractive and now they still live there.
Attractions,
The list of attractions, which Bridlington has, is impressive. Unfortunately, most of them seem to be for the younger generations. This may be because they want to dispel the idea that it is overrun by elderly.
There are archaeological findings that have attracted many people, mostly middle aged and elderly. Having being to Bridlington independently of the school trip I have noticed that it does have a lot for the younger group, but it does at the same time still have plenty for the elderly. I noticed that there are many bus stops. Furthermore there is a theatre and a bowling green plus plenty of similar activities. This may be because the services have been designed to help the large elderly population.
Method
The first piece of data that had to be collected once in Bridlington was a Pedestrian Count. The street on which it was done on was ___________________. The time this Pedestrian Count started was 12 noon. This was the same for everyone’s count. This was necessary because if we had all done them at different times then you couldn’t make a fair comparisons because there are going to be different groups of people in the town at different times of the day.
The next task was to record the Service Provisions in Bridlington. This was to distinguish what services are available and whereabouts they can be located. As well as looking at services provided for residents, we also observed what facilities may have been put in place for tourists. We also observed what age group the facilities were aimed at in order to gain an idea as to whether Bridlington was aimed at a specific age group and if so which age group.
The third task we did was a Shopping Survey, which was done on ________________. We recorded all the shops in this centre, its main function, size of the shop, the percentage of customers that are likely to be tourists and the percentage of customers likely to be local people. The purpose of this survey was to analyse the shops and facilities in Bridlington. For illustration, some shops will be likely to be used more by elderly people while some will be more aimed at teenagers of families.
The fourth task was to do a Customer Observation Survey. We stood outside two different shops and recorded the number of customers and divided them into 3 age groups: 0-20yrs, 21-60yrs, 60+yrs.
Task five was to do a Questionnaire Survey of people over 60. The nature of questions we asked residents were to find out which service or services they regularly used. If they are visiting on a day trip we asked them what facilities they had been using on their trip and what activities they particularly enjoyed in Bridlington. However, this survey may not give an accurate idea of the answers to these questions because we only asked five people so this is a tiny percentage of the elderly people in Bridlington.
The concluding task was to look at three sites in Bridlington and collect information about the sites which would then help us to decide which site would most appropriate for development into Sheltered Housing, consisting of 24 flats to be rented out to elderly people. The sort of factors we had to keep in mind were the size of area needed, cost of the particular location, local facilities, shops, medical, buses, noise levels, hills/slopes.
Site C
It is a derelict site and would take extensive building before it could be converted into housing. It would need much more work than any of the other sites.
It is very close to the train station and may be too noisy for the elderly. The will be a high noise pollution. In addition, there may be young people loitering and older people might find that intimidating.
There is a Bus stop less than 5 minutes walk away. However, busy main roads surround it and there is no pedestrian crossing, which would make it difficult to cross, especially for the elderly.
There are also no shops within short walking distance except a Tesco.
A steep bridge nearby, but the rest of the area is relatively flat.
Site B
The area around this site looked relatively inexpensive. While observing the site, we saw young teens hanging around. Therefore, this area is liable to have many families with children that may cause unwanted stress and be noisy during the night. However, there will be a low noise pollution as it isn’t near any main roads.
There is a hairdressers about five minutes walk away but they don’t do a home hairdressing service. There is also a newsagents nearby but apart from that not many facilities in walking distance. Other facilities could only be reached by car or bus, there were several bus stops five to ten minutes away, and there was a post-box nearby.
The land will be very cheap but a lot of re-housing will have to take place and buildings may need to be demolishes in order to build the flats.
There were several hills in the area.
Site D
10 minutes walk to a variety of facilities, including supermarket; newsagent and doctor’s surgery. This may be too much for the elderly
The roads around are flat and there are pedestrian crossings on Flamborough Rd nearby.
There is a private resident area already, which has CCTV cameras. This would be an extra reassurance to elderly residents who are more vulnerable to burglary etc.
A good point to note is that the surroundings seemed relatively peaceful.
The was a slight slope towards the coast and CBD.
Finally, there were many bus stops surrounding site D.
Evaluation
I think all the information I have gathered shows that Bridlington does have a high elderly population. This is shown by my pedestrian count results (on a bar chart) which shows there to be a large number of elderly people.
The shopping Analysis task has shown that 25% of the shops in Bridlington are Leisure Activities, many of these which be used by elderly people. So Bridlington is making sure it caters for its’ elderly customers as a large percentage of its facilities are designed for them.
However the Customer Observance Survey shows that it does not just cater for elderly visitors because in McDonalds we recorded no customers of the age of 60. But in the Sandown Diner the majority of customers were over the age of 60. This did special prices for OAPs so this shop is just targeting the over 60s so it must see them as a valuable group of customers.
The Service Provision task was quite difficult because we were running out of time and so did not manage to look at many of the services in Bridlington. However, from the information we collected there did seem to be quite a lot of the facilities aimed at older people. There are lots of bus stops and buses do tend to be used by school children and elderly people and also there was a few Bingo halls.
While most of my results from my tasks showed Bridlington to be catering well for elderly residents, my questionnaire survey didn’t. Out of all the residents we spoke to, only one used buses and went to the cinema. All the others did not use any facilities such as bowling green, theatre, meals on wheels etc.
Finally the site I would choose for the sheltered housing is site D. I feel this is an ideal site for elderly people to live in because the surrounding area is a nice environment, it has CCTV and there are good facilities nearby which is a major factor. The other sites were too noisy, lack of good facilities nearby, dangerous roads nearby or had lots of families living nearby which I feel would be a disadvantage as I have already explained in my Method.
Conclusion
Overall I have found that Bridlington does cater for the needs of elderly people, certainly a lot more than other age groups. Many shops and leisure activities there are designed to be used by elderly people and recognise that there is a large elderly population there.
The problems I had were I found it hard to finish all the tasks in the time I had at Bridlington; doing surveys and pedestrian counts are not all that reliable because we didn’t speak to a large number of people so it was not an accurate result and also to make the pedestrian count more accurate you would need to do several over a few days so you had the average results of the number and type of pedestrians because you could do it on a day where there just wasnt many people about for some reason; it is quite difficult having to work with a lot of peoples’ results from the tasks because reading other peoples’ handwriting can be difficult aswell as you do not know how accurate other peoples’ results are.
The part of this project I have enjoyed the most was the enquiry into the best site for sheltered housing. I enjoyed it most because you had to go to a variety of locations and found it interesting comparing how different areas can be all in the same town.
This project would be useful to elderly people thinking about moving to Bridlington as they would want to know whether Bridlington is going to be a good place to live for someone their age; companies wanting to open a branch of their business in Bridlington as this will show them if their company will be targeting the age group that live in Bridlington.
if I was to continue this project the other research I would do would be a longer more detailed Questionnaire survey to get the most accurate results I could, I would actually go to several different types of businesses and ask them how they think their business suits the large number of elderly people in Bridlington and compare this to what actual customers think.
In the future I think Bridlington will continue to focus on providing facilities on elderly people but I think sometimes in the future Bridlington will not be able to survive just mainly on elderly peoples’ custom and so will start designing more facilities making it attractive to younger people who will have more money. But I think Bridlington will continue to have tourism as its main income for a long time yet until the town is finding this very difficult and not making much profit from it. Then I think the town will have to look at other industries it can build up on.
