The plotlands — informal settlements assembled from railway carriages, wooden huts, and self-built bungalows by working-class communities across England and Wales from the late nineteenth century through the interwar period — represent one of the most significant and least understood forms of vernacular housing in UK history. A small number survive. One of the most intact, Bewdley, Worcestershire, faces acute development pressure: contested, politically charged, and at risk of permanent loss.

This project engages Bewdley — its urgency, its complexity, its resistance to formal categorisation — as a field laboratory to develop, test, and refine an original interdisciplinary methodology for researching precarious informal communities and understanding what they reveal about contemporary polycrises of housing, ecology, and belonging. The approach is diffractive: rather than placing disciplines in parallel or seeking convergence, it places genuinely different epistemological lenses in productive contact, treating the tensions and differences between them as sources of knowledge rather than noise to be managed. The research group spans art, philosophy, photography, social science, planning, human geography, and architecture. Over twelve months, we undertake two intensive field visits to Bewdley, working directly with place and community through qualitative a spectrum of methods. A dedicated research assistant provides cross-disciplinary coordination, facilitating the creative tensions of the diffractive co-design events.

The project produces two complementary outputs: co-produced zine publications — developed with and for the Bewdley community and circulated as a material demonstration of the methodology in practice — and a jointly authored paper presenting ‘diffractive methods for researching precarity’ as a transferable framework for future work with at-risk informal places.

The project directly advances the ISRF’s mission: it crosses disciplinary boundaries, challenges inadequate frameworks, and develops genuinely new investigative methodology for an empirically pressing problem. It also lays the foundation for a subsequent major funded programme of plotlands research nationally.