Delimiting the Central Business district in Chippenham

A CBD is a central business district. This is the place where the majority of office blocks are and a large amount of comparison shops and shopping outlets. Also a factor that shows is that the land rent is high leading to the land being used to its full potential.

I predict that there are several places in chippenham that could be possible CBD's. These are as follows:

* In the upper part of the town near to the station

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* In the central high street

* On the outskirts of town located in the bumpers farm industrial estate.

Out of these I believe that the high street and the centre of the town are most likely to show characteristics of a CBD.

Methodology

How we can delimit the CBD of chippenham

In order to find out where the CBD of chippenham is we are going to have to do one or two of several things. We will use the things that CBD's have in common and test chippenham to find where these things are most prominent (where the CBD will be). Some of the test that we can use will be:

* Finding where the pedestrian density is the highest

* Where the larger frontages of the shops are

* Where there are a higher amount of fast food restaurants and cafes

* We could use the nearest neighbour analysis on the shops

* We could use the proportion of the shops and retail outlet compared to the other land used (in the CBD) it would be higher

* We could conduct a business index (if we could gain access to the buildings)

We have decided that due to a limit of time and recourse we will us the following method to find the CBD of Chippenham:

* We will do a pedestrian count at several sites around the centre of the town, counting the amount of people that walk past us in a minute. We will repeat this get an average.

* Pace out the frontage of the shop to find if there are any with a much larger space than others (these will probably be the chain stores).

* And count the number of fast food and restaurant outlets from the arches to the market place at the top of town, as this will give us an idea of where the demand for fast food is at the highest.

Once we have done this we will be able to plot graphs and draw conclusion of where the CBD is.

Results and graphs

A graph to show the pedestrian density on the centre of Chippenham

This graph shows very clearly that as we get closer to the centre of town the density of pedestrians increase which is what we would have expected. Woolworth's is the place where the highest density is this is the middle of the high street.

A graph to show the shop frontage of Chippenham town centre

The largest shop frontage is on the eastern side of the street which includes Wilkinsons and Woolworth's. The largest shop frontage appears to be in the centre of the high street also agreeing with the prediction that I made.

Evaluation

From the evidence we have gathered we can see that the CBD of Chippenham is the centre of town. The pedestrian count showed a higher density of people in the centre than any other location in the town. There we a high amount of fast-food outlets and cafe in the town centre but these numbers decreased the further a way form town you got. The shop frontage count showed that the majority of large shop frontages were chain outlets and the larges ones we positioned in the town centre. However there were a few exceptions like Iceland which had a high frontage but want located in the centre. We also made an observation that in the north of the town there are a high amount of solicitors and building societies. These are comparison businesses so rely on each other for their trade; this is why they are all so close together.

If I were going to this experiment again I would change certain things depending on the amount of money and recourses I had available to me.

I think I would try and have a higher amount of people doing the pedestrian counts so that I could have larger amounts of data. This would hopefully improve the quality and accuracy of my results. I would have done the experiment at several different times if day to find out if that had an influence of the data. The experiment was done on a temperate day so I don't think the weather would have affected the results.

I would have done the frontage of the shops with slightly more accurate equipment (measures with instruments rather than pacing). Thins may have had a bearing on the results however I think that the pacing method was fairly accurate.

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