No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

A few weeks ago, I went in search of fish at Felix­stowe (on the Suf­folk coast, UK), took a wrong turn and found myself try­ing to drive into the Port. In the few minutes it took to ask for dir­ec­tions at the secur­ity gate (where the men were very friendly and help­ful), sev­eral lor­ries came…

2010 marks fifty years since the clos­ure of the Naval Dock­yard on the Isle of Shep­pey in Kent. It was quite a blow to the island. There was the imme­di­ate loss of an ‘occu­pa­tional com­munity’ where the single large employer that had dom­in­ated the local eco­nomy and brought people together with a shared sense of…

The Work­ing Lives of Lon­don­ers is a series of pho­to­graphs by Har­riet Arm­strong on dis­play at City Hall (22 March to 7 May 2010) which shows Lon­don­ers ‘going about their daily routine in the cap­ital’ (The Guard­ian). A selec­tion of images was pub­lished in The Guard­ian in March, but more can be seen on Harriet…

I was stay­ing in a B&B last night and found myself hav­ing break­fast this morn­ing with a Hotel Inspector. He didn’t quite have the style of Alex Polizzi, pic­tured above (of the cur­rent Chan­nel Five Hotel Inspector series) but it was still the most inter­est­ing early morn­ing con­ver­sa­tion I’ve had this week. I’m not sure…

Earlier this year, I star­ted hanging around Billings­gate, London’s whole­sale fish mar­ket. I tell the fish mer­chants there that I’m try­ing to under­stand the whole pro­cess, of where the fish comes from and goes to, how it gets dis­trib­uted, who’s selling what, and more gen­er­ally what goes on at the mar­ket. It’s part of an…

I recently went to the work­shop of a double bass maker and repairer. My friend was tak­ing his battered bass there to see what parts might be glued and oth­er­wise made to hold together again. ‘Can’t you clean it up whilst you’re at it?’ I asked naively, attend­ing to the fin­ish rather than the sound.…

Visual Soci­ology Inter­na­tional Visual Soci­ology Asso­ci­ation: http://www.visualsociology.org/ Brit­ish Soci­olo­gical Asso­ci­ation Visual Soci­ology Study Group: http://www.visualsociology.org.uk/ Visual Soci­ology, A Field Guide: http://visualsociology.wordpress.com/ Soci­olo­gical Images: http://sociologicalimages.blogspot.com/search/label/work

  Glue and sil­icon, paint and var­nish, grout and wood-filler. Traces on his clothes. The trousers espe­cially tell the story of my friend’s most recent jobs. There was that shower to fix urgently in Hack­ney one night last week, and the bath­room to sort out after a would-be plumber with too many tools and too…

There’s a piece of rail­way track in my house. It looks, unsur­pris­ingly, out of place. It wasn’t inten­ded for the man­tel­piece or to be a door­stop. But now it’s here it would be quite a job to take it any­where else. You see, it’s incred­ibly heavy. You need two hands to lift it even though…