Emily Dunning (Lower Sixth)
On Wednesday 4th March, on a cold and rainy afternoon, the Lower Sixth Geography students embarked on a trip round Bedford. This was part of the beginning of our new topic, Changing Places, and in preparation for our field trip this weekend. We spent time exploring areas of the town we knew and didn’t know as well, finding out new and exciting information ready to use in our coursework pieces.
We studied contrasting areas such as the Embankment, the centre of town and Queens Park, and within this completed ‘what makes a great place’ wheels to reflect the quality of life in such areas and highlight certain issues we believe are present in Bedford. We also had a chance to visit historical sites such as Castle Mound and to study murals on the buildings in areas such as Midland Road. We carried out non-participant observations, which meant we could study the people, traffic, land use and culture within areas and also wrote word pictures for two contrasting areas giving an overall conclusion for what the areas were like.
As students, it was a great eye opener to the local area and we all enjoyed learning about areas we had never paid particular attention to previously and will help our future studies. All of us now feel prepared to take the skills we learnt forward to our field trip to the Cranedale Centre in Scarborough this weekend and hope the weather isn’t too bad!
