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 was walk­ing through New Cross in South East Lon­don recently when I saw these pho­tos of fire-fighters’ hands. They were fixed to the rail­ings out­side the fire sta­tion, as a kind of heroic cel­eb­ra­tion it seemed to me — and with just cause — of the work that fire-fighters do.

In Decem­ber 2005, just a few months into a two-year research con­tract at Essex, the bull-dozers arrived and star­ted dig­ging dir­ectly out­side my office. Con­struc­tion of the new Social Sci­ence Research Build­ing was finally under­way. A good thing for sure, in prin­ciple but not in such close prox­im­ity. Still, I took to look­ing out of…

I recently spent the night above a Tube sta­tion in North Lon­don. A friend of mine has moved into the sta­tion house there which is lit­er­ally built around the ticket office. You wouldn’t really notice it as a dwell­ing unless you knew, you’d just assume it was offices or some­thing. Any­way, the line is overground…

This pro­ject ana­lyses the social organ­isa­tion of work on a build­ing site and the dif­fer­ent forms of labour that go into the refur­bish­ment of a build­ing. It explores the ways in which the build­ing space is con­cep­tu­al­ised and lived by those who work on the pro­ject – build­ers, archi­tects and engin­eers – and the ways…