I used to live in Eccles in Salford (Greater Manchester) before coming to University of Northampton and I'd like to evaluate how sustainable is my community on the example of this place where I used to live for a year. I want to start with some of the statistics I'm taking from the Office for National Statistics. According to the data on the website the neighborhood is quite deprived, health is worse than average in the country, life expectancy is low, economic activity and employment rates are very close but still lower than average in England and land use 4-5 times worse with green space being at 19% in comparison with nationwide level of 87%. Overall I would say that Eccles in not really a sustainable place even though in my neighborhood situation was much better in comparison with the rest of the area. I was living in leafy part of the area with a lot of new developments built there in the last 5-7 years. Close proximity of the shopping area as well as convenient transportation system made it very advantageous place to live in. Bus traffic was quite frequent but at the same time most of the people used cars because of the beneficial location of the place which, while being a main hub for locals of the area to get to work, was also very green with a lot of trees on the sides of the roads and clean pavements. The area I am talking about is laying on the north of Eccles and i dominated by residential buildings. At the same time market street with all the main amenities ,including some restaurants, bars, hairdressing salons as well as standard post office and bank branch, make this place an attractive neighborhood for living while nearby school and hotel add something extra to the picture of a local area. Basically hospital would be the only facility missing in that ensemble; I was also going to mention a big shopping centre but remembered that there's only 2-3 miles to the Trafford Centre, one of the biggest retail venues of the country. Overall, I'd say that statistics of the major part of Eccles overshadowed small but wealthy neighborhood I used to live in. Stats of unemployment, land use, economic activity and overall deprivation level are based on the combined data of the whole area and could be easily misunderstood in the leafy part of area where frequent and convenient transport makes no stress to local people, busy roads are surrounded by trees and small residential place is provided with almost all the main facilities, amenities and activities a single household needs. That's the ambivalent truth of the place on the west of Manchester, place I used to live in before I cam to Northampton.
