Brent Cross Town: Your next case study?
Updated July 2024 to include recent updates to the development
For many of us, the Regenerating Places topic of the Edexcel A-Level has been the hardest to get to grips with despite now having taught it for years! Every year Twitter and other support groups are awash with geography teachers wanting to re-plan it, re-approach it or (often) give up and switch to the alternative topic. Paul Logue summarises the most common complaints about it here- comments I previously found myself nodding along to. Indeed, for each of the first 5 years that I taught it, I was never been happy with it…
I blogged here about the model of delivery that I find works for me and central to that is teaching EQ3 and EQ4 through place studies. In this blog, I talk about using Brent Cross Town as one of those extended place studies and share the resources that I’ve made thus far to use in the classroom.
Why Brent Cross Town?
I first became interested in this project when the vast regeneration project was just 15 minutes from my previous school and thus part of the everyday geographies of our students. I knew that I would be able to easily take students to visit it and, I suspected, many would consider exploring it for their NEA. I now work further afield but continue to use Brent Cross Town in my teaching for a number of reasons including the sheer scale of the project, the focus on measuring the success of the regeneration more scientifically through the Flourishing Index and the nature of the public-private partnerships being utilised in the project.
In June 2024 I attended an event held at Brent Cross Town as part of the London Festival of Architecture that looked at how well-being can be placed right at the heart of place-marking. I learnt a lot about the regeneration project and the unique approach and my notes from the event are shared here.
Resources thus far
To develop my resources about this regeneration project, I took the following approach:
Step 1: Which specification points could I use this to cover?
I am a big fan of a simple A3 sheet at A-Level! Here are the two used for this example where, having completed their in-depth study of the project, students simply complete each box with summary notes for each spec point.
Step 2: How can I engage with different sources of information to ensure the best possible resources and subject knowledge?
The following sources have proved useful so far:
1. Follow the Brent Cross Town Twitter account.
2. Use the Brent Cross Town website- particularly the regularly published local newsletters.
3. Use the local newspaper website for other updates about the site and opinion pieces.
There was another long article about the development in the Times and the Financial Times- both shared as documents in the folder below.
Step 3: How can I build a resource bank that can be tweaked as necessary over the coming years?
Rather than divide the material up into different discrete lessons, I decided to create one bank of resources that I can tweak and develop into individual lessons as needed. For an ever-changing case study such as this one where new material, information and resources is shared via Twitter, the website, and local media, I find this the easiest way to organise everything. My current bank is shared here. These resources are very much the base that I then go on to tweak- our lessons are incredibly discussion based but that isn’t reflected in these resource bank.
I hope this blog and the accompanying resources may prove useful to a geography teacher or two. Please let me know if you do use the resources and how you find teaching this case study!