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

I’ve been giv­ing a lot of thought to wash­ing lately. I don’t have a wash­ing machine in my apart­ment in Cagliari which means that some­thing I usu­ally take for gran­ted – being able to wash and dry my clothes at home and whenever I like – imposes itself as an activ­ity to find a solution…

I am cur­rently stay­ing in the city of Cagliari in the south of Sardinia where I’ve noticed street vendors, many of whom are young(ish) men from Senegal, seek­ing to dir­ect people into park­ing spaces (which are often scarce in the city). Appar­ently, this isn’t primar­ily about park­ing. I’m told it’s a tac­tic to gen­er­ate sales,…

My first taste of the fish mar­ket in Cagliari was just that. It seemed to me that as soon as we got out of the car parked next to the mar­ket the air quite lit­er­ally tasted of fish. Down a few steps into the fish sec­tion of the purpose-built covered Mer­cato San Bene­detto, we were…

I saw the wooden posts pho­to­graphed in these pic­tures on a recent visit to Lowest­oft (on the east coast of the UK) to research the his­tory of fish­ing there. They looked strange but estab­lished on a small stretch of land between the sea and the main road, in the area north of the town known…

There was a fire oppos­ite my mother’s house, behind the bun­ga­low on the other side of the green. I’ve been look­ing at that bun­ga­low a lot lately as build­ers have been car­ry­ing out what seems to be a major refur­bish­ment. I’ve seen so much stuff go into the skip on the front drive that I’ve…

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…