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

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.…

  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…

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…