Tma_01

In this first assignment I shall be comparing “The Street” & Bramford Road. Bramford Road is roughly 2 miles long & it takes you eventually to a small village called Bramford. It is a main bus route from town & fairly busy. There are many sets of traffic lights due to the many new housing estates that have recently been built. It is mostly a residential area with rows of terraced houses built in the early part of the 1900’s & house prices are cheaper in this area. There used to be patches of waste land where children would play, but housing developers have brought & built on all the spare space. There is an off license, 2 paper shops, 3 hairdressers, bank, school, kebab shop, chemist, 2 M.O.T centers , Tesco Express, Farm foods & a record office which used to be the old school. Further down the road going out of town, there is a hair salon, chip shop, tackle shop & nursery. Bramford Road is mostly used by the local community, for use of the local shops & school, & travelling to & from their place of work. It is a rundown area of the town & cheaper house prices reflect this. However the further you travel into bramford the better the level of class seems to be. It mostly has a poor class of people the town end of the road, where there are several blocks of 3 story high flats owned by the local council & has a noticeable drug problem. However, the local council have improved the look of the flats by adding double glazing, planted some flowers & had 2 of the 3 phone boxes removed to help prevent loitering. The emergency services are frequently called to the block of flats, mostly the police, & the cctv for some reason doesn’t cover that part of the road. Here I find similarities with “City Road” with the crime that PC Keohane mentions with the drug & shoplifting offences. Parking is mostly residential only & cannot park anywhere accept some side roads further out of the town end or the 2 hour limit outside the row of shops, which is a huge problem on a Saturday due to the volume of football traffic & people using the parking space to park there & walk in town to avoid the local car park charges .One good thing is that run down eye sore empty sitting shops have been gradually reopened by polish immigrants. The polish community seems to clump together & not mix with the locals, & only polish people use those shops! Again I find similarities here with “City Road”, where the African shopkeeper Janet Symmons, brings items in direct from Africa, like for example cloth, hair extensions & handmade pencil cases not only to help with the economy, but to give an authentic range of goods. There is plenty of competition on Bramford Road . Not just people using the streets for their space on the pavements or the roads , but for the same shops. For example there are 3 hair salons within 3 blocks of each other. One is a polish owned hair salon , but the other two are both barbers, both of which offer exactly the same service & compete to keep their businesses open. There are 3 off licences within the same distance too. While studying “City Road” I have noticed a few similarities with Bramford Road. One of which is the level of safety, level of crime & local immigrants which I have already mentioned. REFERENCES Making social lives on City Road 2009 scene 2 Making social lives on City Road scene 6 Word count 615. SELF REFLECTION I found how people make up society interesting. I found explaining difficult. I know what I want to say, but have difficulty explaining it. Also the typing up is all new to me.