Dr Esther Draycott discusses the research that she will be undertaking on the “Making Sustainable Homes: The Design Industry, the Data Gap and Design Innovation” project led by CDH-members Dr Megha Rajguru and Dr Tom Ainsworth.

I am delighted to be joining Brighton’s Centre for Design History as a Research Fellow. I finished my PhD at the Glasgow School of Art in October last year. Entitled ‘Depth and Surface: Women’s style as memorial, resistance and reverie in late 1970s and early 1980s Glasgow’, it looked at style as a feminine idiom of urban, working-class life: something people use to communicate a complex identity for themselves in the face of reductive or hostile social judgement. ‘Depth’ and ‘surface’ were key themes in my thesis and remain so in my research generally. I am interested in the way some people in society are ascribed depth, and some aren’t. Clothes and soft furnishings sit somewhere between depth and surface, which is why I find them so fascinating to study. They are on the outside of the body, but they also porous, flexible membranes through which whatever is on the inside can make itself known.

In this role, I will be assisting on an interdisciplinary AHRC project led by Dr Megha Rajguru, Prof Rupali Gupte, Dr Dipak Sarker and Dr Tom Ainsworth called ‘Designing Spaces, Making Sustainable Homes: The Design Industry, the Data Gap and Design Innovation’. Here we are looking at ‘informal and non-standard productions of inhabitations’ in the UK and India to try and see how they could inform more sustainable, dignified and sensitive policy approaches to housing. As part of this, I will be exploring what people living in collective, temporary or otherwise makeshift habitations have done to make their spaces work for them – how, whether through small acts of decoration or large-scale interventions in the design process, residents have turned houses into homes.

Last week, Megha Rajguru and I visited the Bishopsgate Institute to look at a few collections in their archives. This included historic papers, publications, reports and resources from the charity Shelter, and a range of material drawn from the Clays Lane Housing Co-op, a collective housing project for single people in Stratford, London, which was active from the 1980s until it was demolished in 2005. Looking through all of these boxes, I found stories of feminist design teams retrofitting council houses, tenant co-operatives buying back swathes of gentrifying cities, and displaced people creating lush gardens, community centres and tool libraries in areas dismissed as ‘hard to let’. Sitting in an archive on the edge of London’s Spitalfields, a place once dominated by social housing since transformed into the commercial district it is today, the purpose of unearthing these stories of radical homemaking felt clear. I’m looking forward to discovering more, and to working closely with this brilliant department.