In early March 2026 I worked with third year undergraduate students at Bath Spa. Their final project, Edgelands, focuses on urban margins and the questions we often avoid asking. As meeting points between private lives and collective infrastructures, the three sites, located in Avonmouth on Bristol’s periphery, expose the tension between everyday routines and global systems.
The workshop brief was to develop conceptual models that respond to these complex site conditions. Students worked with broken glass, mild steel, fabrics, wood, and foam.
The resulting models explored the friction between domestic and industrial environments that characterises the edgeland sites. Themes included graffiti under an M5 motorway flyover, sewage treatment facilities, and cinema. One project strives to make music education inclusive and affordable, whilst another uses human characters of different scales to exaggerate the contrast between oppressive and liberating spaces.
A camera and a dedicated photography space set up in the studio accommodated convenient visual documenting throughout the day: see slide show below.
At the end of the workshop, students shared their learnings, responses to the brief, and upcoming steps in small discussion groups of four or five.
no.balsa 