INTRODUCTION

The medieval city of Winchester is situated in Hampshire, an hour away from London by train or car and attracts many tourist visitors each year. We chose to investigate the diversity of the High Street to see whether this played a part in visitor attraction to Winchester.

ENQUIRY

We categorised each unit of the 808m High Street into the following:

• Fast Food
• Cafe/Coffee Shop
• Bakery
• Public Houses
• Restaurants
• Clothing
• Charity
• Shoe
• Museum/Information
• Craft/Hobby/Book
• Supermarket/Food Shop
• Convenience
• Card/Gift
• Hardware
• Electronics/Home Appliance
• Phone Shops
• Banks
• Jewellers
• Estate Agents
• Travel Agents
• Department Stores
• Empty
• Hair & Beauty Salons
• Health Care
• Health & Beauty
• Other

We then grouped these subcategories into the following to enable us to present the data effectively:

• Retail
• Health & Beauty
• Service
• Tourism
• Charity
• Empty
• Food & Drink
• Other

We decided as a group to investigate a simple cross-section of the City centre, looking only at the main High Street from the Great Hall to King Alfred's Statue, excluding any side streets and therefore any units on those side streets.
We split into pairs and divided the High Street into left and right sides to ensure that we tallied each unit accurately into the pre-agreed subcategories.

Fig. 1: A Map showing Winchester City centre. The black line indicates the cross-section of which we took our data. Source: http://www.visitwinchester.co.uk/xsdbimgs/WINCHESTER%20CITY%20Map.pdf

DATA

Fig. 2: Bar chart to show number of units in each subcategory.

Fig. 3: Pie chart showing the distribution of units.

GENERAL PUBLIC OPINIONS

We asked various people in the High Street their opinion on the diversity of Winchester City centre.
One consumer felt "There's too many phone shops and not enough free parking". Our research shows that 4.72% of units within the High Street are in fact phone shops, which in our opinion is relatively high. However, after talking to another lady, we found that her opinion was that, "There is a nice range of shops". Looking at our pie chart (Fig. 3), excluding the high volume of phone shops, you can see that there is also a vast array of differing units including shops and eateries.

We approached a group of students and asked them if there was anything they would change about the diversity of the High Street. One commented "There's not enough student friendly shops offering cheap prices or discount. If we want to do a big shop we choose to go to Southampton." Another stated "I haven't explored the tourist side of Winchester because it is too expensive".

CONCLUSION

Our geographical enquiry into the impact of the diversity of the High Street on Winchester's tourism has suggested that whilst it attracts many visitors to the area, it doesn't necessarily cater for each individual consumer's needs.
Winchester is a large University city, whose students use the High Street for convenience but feel that it does not fully meet their needs as consumers on a budget.
It is also important to take into consideration that Winchester High Street is not the only contributing factor to tourism in the area as it is also a historic and culturally rich place of interest.