Outline_the_Inequalities_on_a_Street_Which_You_Know

TMA 01 Drawing on what you have learned about City Road from the Making Social Lives DVD and Learning Companion 1, outline some of the inequalities on a street which you know. Drawing on what i have learnt from my study materials including the DVD and the learning companion 1, i will write on differences and similarities which bring inequalities on City Road and compare it to that of a street i know called, High Street Beckenham, it is in Beckenham in the London borough of Bromley .Until the coming of the railway in 1857, Beckenham was a small village in the county of Kent with completely rural surroundings. (Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia).Beckenham has a leafy image and has eight railway stations to London which makes it ideal business location. It has a lot of good private and state schools and the high street contains many up market chain of restaurants as well as family run independent ones. Super markets on the high street include Sainsbury’s at the beginning, Lidl in the middle, Marks and Spencer towards the end and Waitrose super market at the end of the High Street. There are a number of visible inequalities on high street Beckenham and these includes age, gender, traffic and shops. High street Beckenham is not as busy compared to City Road but there are a lot of expensive private cars parked on one side of the road from one end to the other which makes life a bit difficult for bus drivers and users of the bus and this is as a result of the high middle class population in Beckenham. One will perhaps argue the pedestrians and bus users will come first before the private drivers but I guess most of these car users make up the law makers in the council and hence the inequalities. When it comes to shops, both roads aimed at different groups of people at different times of the day, on City Road, the elderly has the choice of enjoying the café whilst the young and the student at night enjoy the take away restaurants, on High Street Beckenham, during the day the young mothers seems to occupy the trendy upmarket cafes and is always pack full with mothers and toddlers leaving most of the elderly nowhere to go .City road used to be a country lane a couple of centuries ago, by 1960’s there have been a lot of car show rooms , today most have been replaced by take away restaurants and cafes targeting the students population and ethnic minorities.(The Street Scene 1). Meaning if not for the likes of Jose Ramos Suarez and his Taste Bud Café most original residence and the elderly would be left out. From the social lives DVD a lady was complaining about how she dislikes Tesco but found herself shopping there because for convenient sake comparing that to high street Beckenham, the supermarket are so welcoming, have wide variety of stocks and the competitive pricing makes it so welcoming. They have extremely good disable accessibilities therefore attract a lot of shoppers making the smaller independent shops losing out to the big ones. Most of the independent shops have average normal doors that can be sometimes difficult for disable access and therefore as much as disable people on wheel chairs will like to shop in the smaller independent shops, they end up in the bigger ones instead. High street Beckenham has few ethnic minority, all the shops clienteles are for non ethnic minority hence, the minority travelling to Lewisham or Penge for their food stuffs but on city road a couple of the ethnic minority women has taken upon themselves to provide to the needs of their people by selling African goods and the other for the Asian market. From everything I have learnt on city road and also on high street Beckenham, I have come to recognised, all roads are the same but also very different. Facilities like sewage, Television cables, Telephones etc tend to be the same whilst road layout, shops and people who uses the street tends to vary, I will therefore conclude that a street is made up of people who uses them and the nature of a particular street in this contemporary Britain attracts the sort of people who wants to use them and therefore no matter how a street is viewed there will be winners and losers connecting to their social and economic status hence the inequalities. References Blakely, G., Bromley, S., Clarke, J., Raghuram, P., Silva, E. And Taylor, S. (2009) DD101 Introducing the Social Sciences: part 1, ‘Learning Companion 1’, Milton Keynes, The Open University. Word count 714 Self-reflection Starting this online course was really daunting but the Saturday tutorials has really been great, it has given me ideas on the topic and the shared ideas from other student has really been good. The essay writing was going to be very difficult for me but by the end of my second tutorial i felt a bit confident as the tutor explained to us how to go about it.