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Sphere of influence of Craiglockhart shopping street
Introduction
Shopping areas have a hierarchy within a city. At the city centre are high order shops which attract people from a large area while in suburban areas
low-order shops attract people from a much smaller area. I am going to look
at Craiglockhart shopping street, which is located on Colinton Road in the
suburbs of south-west Edinburgh to see if it fits this pattern.
Research question
What influences the size and shape of the sphere of inf luence of
Craiglockhart shopping street?
Source 1
In order to find out the sphere of influence of Craiglockhart shopping street I
carried out a questionnaire of 20 shoppers. I carried this out on a Tuesday
morning which means that some of the services were not used at that time.
One problem of this technique is that if I had carried it out on a different day
or time I may have obtained different results. I only asked a limited number
of people and some people did not have time to answer my questions.
Source 2
I mapped the use of the buildings in the shopping street. There were no
problems in collecting this information.
ADDED VALUE UNIT (NATIONAL 4, GEOGRAPHY)
© Crown copyright 2012
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Findings
Diagram 1 shows the sphere of influence of Craiglockhart shopping street. It
has a fairly small sphere of influence but a bit larger than expected, with a
few people coming from housing areas further to the east. If the examples to
the east are ignored then it can be described as a linear shape.
The size of the sphere of influence can be explained by the type of shops and
services on offer. Most of the shops are low-order convenience stores, eg
Premier general store and the newsagent/post office, which people are only
willing to travel a short distance to reach. However , Craiglockhart shopping
street is unusual as it does contain a few higher-order services such as the car
salesroom and the tailors. The customer from Morningside, for example, was
visiting the car salesroom.
Another reason for the size and shape of the sphere of influence is the fact
that Craiglockhart shops are located on a main road, which means that it is
very accessible. The linear shape follows Colinton Road.
Diagram 2 shows the results you would mostly expect for a suburban
shopping street. Most people visit the shops fairly frequently, once a week
followed by every day. They tend to walk and use these shops because they
are easy to get to.
Many of the shoppers used their car, again showing that being near a main
road is important and the street has parking bays off the main road. Despite
having a bus stop only one person came by bus. The influence of the road can
also be seen in the fact that one person from further away used the post office
here because they were passing through.
This shopping street is also directly opposite Craiglockhart Sports Ce ntre and
that could mean that it gets customers who are using the sports centre so
could live quite far away but this did not show up in my survey.
Conclusion
In conclusion I have found that Craiglockhart shopping street has a larger
sphere of influence than might be expected from a suburban shopping parade
due to its accessibility on a main road, which has led to a number of higherorder services locating here.
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ADDED VALUE UNIT (NATIONAL 4, GEOGRAPHY)
© Crown copyright 2012