Dd_101

Drawing upon what you have learned about City Road, outline some of the ways differences are made and remade on a street that you know. The street that I have chosen to compare to City Road is called Cosham High Street. Cosham is a relatively small shopping area around a mile long in a small area of a vastly populated City. The differences that I will be looking at are the diversity of people and their ages that use Cosham in the first paragraph, the more recent changes from the early 1980’s to the present and the shops in the second and finally the street furniture . As with City Road Cosham has a diverse mix of people from all areas of life. Students of varying ages and ethnicity can be seen walking to the local college. People use Cosham for its transport links into the Centre of town. There are many families of varying ages and ethnicity and pensioners using Cosham for its locality and ease of accessibility from the surrounding area. The local workforce from in and directly around Cosham can be seen making use of the cafes, chip shops and Tesco’s on their way through the area. There is a vast difference at night time. Like City Road, Cosham takes on a different atmosphere to the day time. However, unlike City Road it is not as busy. Cosham has one or two takeaways and these open late into the evening. Not many older people can be seen using Cosham like the men in the Municipal Club (The Street, 2009, Scene 5) there is a fear of the area due to the increased amount of young people that like to meet up and hang out. Like City Road Cosham High Street has seen many changes. (The Street, 2009, Scene 1) In the early 1980s Cosham was mainly dominated by Building Societies, Estate agents and Charity shops. Changes were made when the top half was turned into a precinct. This allowed the users of Cosham to be a lot safer and made the area more accessible due to increased parking facilities. As we see in City Road (the Street, 2009, Scene 3) the arrival of larger chain stores such as Tescos had a profound effect on local traders. Only one Newsagents survived the arrival of Tescos and one butcher, these surviving shops only managed to do so by being at the opposite end of the High Street to Tescos. They kept their identities of Butcher and Newsagents but added to the services they already provided to the area. Newsagents a dry cleaning and bill payment service and the butchers a delivery service. On City Road we see there are a lot of shops that cater for the changing cultural needs through migration and immigration (The Street, 2009, Scene 2) like Exquisite who caters for all sorts of cultural needs from beauty to regional food. This has not happened in Cosham causing an inequality of products offered to the multi-cultural community disconnecting them from the area, forcing them to go further afield into the centre of town to find the products they need . Finally we will look at the street furniture that is on Cosham High Street. Like City road (Material Lives, 2009, Scene 1) there are many similarities. Like City Road Cosham has a high number of seating areas, lighting, bins and security cameras spread throughout the Precinct at the top and the area towards the bottom. The two halves are brought together by a Crossing which is highly visible to pedestrians and road users and has brail on the buttons and highly visible pavement and road markings. Cosham has an extra piece of street furniture that was not on City Road. This is called an information booth. It is free standing and highly visible and has a touch screen facility where people are able to discover maps of the shopping area, where they can be signposted to transport links, Doctors, Libraries, colleges and any groups that meet around the area. In writing this assignment I have concluded that there are constant elements of my chosen street that are made and remade . Also from studying the course material I can see that there are many differences between my chosen street and that of City Road, however, at the same time there are many similarities and inequalities happening. There are common threads that link City Road and my chosen street but they can also be found on streets everywhere. References ‘The Street’ (2009) Making Social Lives [DVD], Milton Keynes, The Open University