Brent Cross Town: Your next case study?

Updated January 2024 to include recent updates to the development
Written April 2023
For many of us, the Regenerating Places topic of the Edexcel A-Level has been the hardest to get to grips with since the reforms of 2016. 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 find myself nodding along to! Indeed, for each of the past 5 years that I’ve taught it, I’ve never been happy with it…

Last academic year, I decided to try and change that and with our KS3, GCSE and other A-Level topics requiring only light tweaking, I committed to giving this topic the time and effort it requires to improve it (and my goodness, it takes time…!). In this blog, I talk about using Brent Cross Town as a case study and share the resources that I’ve made thus far to use in the classroom.

Why Brent Cross Town?
The vast Brent Cross Town 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.

However, as well as proximity, I was also excited by the opportunity to follow a regeneration project from the early stages and build my own resources and subject knowledge as the project unfolds. One of the things I find hardest about other regeneration case studies (e.g. The Olympic Park and the London Docklands) is the overwhelming amount of information out there.

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 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.

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 would be incredibly discussion based but that isn’t reflected in these resources.

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!