A-Level Geography

Year 12 A-Level Geography Field-trip

The cold but purposeful day was put to good use by the Geography students, who led, planned and ‘experienced’ the set up and construction of a field trip, based upon ‘Urban Regeneration’ in two contrasting areas in the East End of London – the Greenwich Peninsular and Canning Town. The purpose of this trip was to allow learners to lead the learning and the Year 12’s to construct and demonstrate their fieldwork skills that they had learnt in class, in a public setting, where collecting data was one of their main priorities and also to gain first hand case study knowledge for Paper 2 of their final examination.

We planned our route and the logistics carefully in both locations, navigated our way through a maze of Urban Regeneration Flagship Schemes and absorbed the scale of the projects that catered for a range of people and communities on the Greenwich Peninsula. It was astounding to see how striking the difference was between the two locations mentioned above, understanding the importance of studying and understanding urban regeneration and how it affects the people who are impacted by it. We conducted techniques such as Land Use Surveys, Footfall counts, Photographic Analysis, Environmental Quality Surveys and Questionnaires.

A small snapshot of our day was to look at Transportation and how it has increased accessibility in a city location. Examples of this that we saw were the expansion of the Jubilee line, where it now reaches North Greenwich, meaning more accessibility to venues such as the 02 Arena or the Icon Outlet and to experience the Emirates Cable Car and the value of it as a river crossing and a tourist attraction to the local area.

The East End of London became our classroom for the day and we felt fortunate to have such creative and thoughtful planning on our door steps. We discovered that the area of Canning Town is slowly but surely redeveloping, giving hope for the future in terms of bringing in investment but also opportunities based around education, housing, business, transportation etc… for all in the community.

The day went exceptionally well, despite the climatic conditions and we learnt a lot. A big thank you to Mr Lobo, for organising this trip with us, as it will be very useful for our own personal ‘Individual Investigations’ and our futures examinations. We look forward to the next trip already!

Written by Chanel Younes (Yr 12) and Mr Lobo