One of the biggest and most obvious points of interest is the Old Chapel, a stone structure over three hundred and fifty years old. Years ago, as the name suggests, it was used as a chapel. Today, the chapel is a museum and part of the national trust. This has a mixed effect.
When tourists come to visit, this benefits a lot of the local business owners. The hotels and restaurants take more bookings and the small ‘quaint’ local shops gain more custom. Just outside the chapel there is a market, so the market traders benefit from tourists walking through to see their wares.Depending on where the tourists are staying, the taxi companies can also see a raise in volume of business. On this side of the coin everyone is a winner, however whilst tourism boosts trade and in turn the lives of some people, there are others whom it hinders.
When the hustle and bustle of the High Street is enhanced, local disabled residents and mothers with small children find it increasingly hard to get around town. This makes it difficult for them to get to the market and High Street shops to get food shopping, necessities or even just their social interaction. For them, this can mean losing out.At night, when the chapel is closed and the market packed away, the pubs come alive. There are several pubs on the High Street and each caters to a different crowd. Mostly they are aimed at the younger crowd, two aimed at an older, quieter crowd.
All of these are busy Friday and Saturday nights, when the majority of the locals do not have work the next day. The locals enjoy a relaxing and social evening. The landlord gains enhanced custom and also hopefully good PR, if the customers are happy enough to tell their friends. Everyone is a winner.
However, this does also add to some people losing out.Residents who live in the close vicinity of these pubs have to put up with the noise in their homes. This can be distressing, cause them to lose sleep or even lower the value on their homes. Because Claydon is a popular but small town, there is very minimal parking. In the high street there are seven unrestricted parking spaces. For those people who manage to get them, this helps them greatly to get around the town or to go to work without having the worry of where to park.
There is one main car park, which is time restricted and a pay and display. This helps the locals in the sense that there is somewhere they can park, if they need.It also benefits the council, as they control the car park and receive any monies that people pay into it. Other than this, there is no other parking on or just off of the High Street. This helps local business owners both win and lose. Because the cars cannot park on the side of the road, the local business fronts are not obscured and therefore are in the public line of sight.
Lots of the business fronts have their main advertisements on, drawing people in from the street who might not have gone in otherwise. If the cars were parked in front of them, they may not appear so prominent and could therefore lose this advantage.The fact that it is not easy just to pull up outside a shop and ‘pop in’ though, means that this could also be losing potential business from passing cars who may find it easier to shop elsewhere. There are lots of material elements to Claydon High Street, both visible and not that affect the lives of people everyday helping to create winners and losers of everyone in different ways.
The high street caters for different people in endless ways and in that respect is very similar to the likes of City Road in Cardiff. There will always be parts of a street that people lose by as well as win, because every person has different needs.
