Now that I have a fairly good idea about what I am going to focus on in the Stonehouse area, me and my group took a stroll down to Union Street to have a good look at the place and take photos of anything that we felt would help us achieve the transformation. Here are some of the photos taken that i felt were significant to my project.
These 2 photos are from the very end of Union Street. The top 1 facing away from Union Street and the 1 underneath is a photo to show how the street looks from the end looking towards it.
This will help me at seeing just traffic in the street because as shown there are very little points of interest for pedestrians to be attracted to such as shops or any facilities. This means there will be very little people walking about the place at most times of the day so traffic traveling through this area are clearly only in the direction to, or from Union Street.
The sign actually reads Union Street showing that it is the very beginning of the street and acts as a welcome to people entering. However having got a driving license and driven myself for a couple of years I see signs purely for the purpose of road users/drivers in vehicles. This is because signs welcome and inform people to the fact that they have now left one destination and has traveled into another. They also serve the purpose of navigation for people to find certain places they are looking for, which can be used in aid of such technology as satellite navigation systems, which work by directing drivers to they're desired destination, allowing the driver to compare what the sat nav is telling them to the actual signs on the road.
For this reason, I took more photos of signs specifically placed for traffic in the area to follow as this could become useful later.
The trees and grass in the picture below the sign show the cross between traffic and green spaces. another member of the group decided to focus on this and explained that just because there is green areas, doesn't necessarily mean its a place people are likely to go to visit or stop and relax. This is a perfect example of this.
This photo isn't of the street itself, but on the street to the side. The reason I found this significant is because it is a path from Union Street to another, but has a post blocking the middle. This limits the space and is used to stop cars traveling through it. I found this interesting as Union Street is the main road that transports traffic in the Stonehouse area, but this clearly shows that this path is strictly intended for pedestrians. This shows that vehicles can pass through the street, but are given limited options to divert off it to another.
There are many shops and clubs along both sides of the road though, perhaps the reason for limiting the ability to access other streets from this road is to reduce the traffic passing through the area and are forced to find another route to get to the other streets that surround Union Street. This would in effect reduce congestion and would mean traffic traveling through the area would be just passing, or actually visiting shops along the street.
In these photos I wanted to show how the traffic is manipulated and controlled. The traffic lights are currently displaying a green light, which we all know allows traffic to pass.
The photo beneath that 1 shows the direction the traffic must flow around the roundabout, which again is straight forward and common knowledge to anyone who has a driving license, but I included these in the photos as I wanted to show that even though this road like roads in general are intended for vehicles, but they are limited to what they are able to do.
These 2 photos show how pedestrians travel using bus as public transportation. As Union Street is such a busy place for traffic as well as providing people with shops and clubs it makes sense to have a method of public transport such as buses to run through every so often. Clearly buses will use this street just to pass by to get through, but I found it interesting, not so much that there was a bus stop, but its location. This bus stop sits right down the end of Union Street, more than likely because this won't cause such an issue when the bus stops for traffic to be able to maneuver around it. To have the stop here also means its safer for pedestrians, allowing them to get on and off without the business of cars and a lot of other people surrounding them. Another reason I thought could be possible may be that pedestrians getting off at this stop are now forced to walk past all the shops when they walk back down, this could have an influence on sales the shops receive.
This last photo was taken from Google images:
Source
Both of these images are of abandoned and unused buildings. The 1st 1 is quite simply nasty to look at. It does nothing for Union Street other than decrease its aesthetic properties as well as make people who walk past it not want to spend long doing so.
The second is of the dance academy. This to me greatly stood out as a building with hug potential. It was also the largest building on Union Street, and definitely looked like it was once a beautiful building. It was very demoralizing to see how such a positive thing such as this, as well as having a great amount of beauty become such a run down and mistreated place. To see how something which could once have potentially been the highlight of Union Street become such a large abandoned amount of space made me wonder how.
As a result of this and my great attraction to it, I will research on the past of this building at some stage and find out what it was, but also what went wrong.
I think I will also include this building in my postcard.
Finally this photo also shows the amount of wasted space in the area. This photo can be considered as a 'green' area. It even has a bench that can be seen to the bottom right of the picture. Which in my opinion is ridiculous. To think somebody would even want to sit in that place being surrounded by muck, bars, passing traffic and not even a remote amount of scenery.
Whats worse is that its neighbor is the run down abandoned dance academy. Having a place for people to rest such as this is just horrible and is definitely not a place I would consider going to to relax.
Conclusion:All the photos taken of Union Street will help me in transforming it and imagining a way it could be improved, also providing me with a good knowledge of what it may possibly look like in the future.
The points made earlier about the bus stop and ease for pedestrians use should be something I consider when I start transforming Stonehouse for the better, attempting to make the environment much more friendly for both road users and pedestrian.
They will also help me when i design my postcard, which factors I want to see the same, changed, or gone completely such as traffic limitations and wasted space such as the unused buildings.
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