RCA SoA Annual Research Programme (2025-26)
In collaboration with Cathy Hawley

Lives in Common is a school-wide lecture series that investigates the changing forms of shared dwelling in the UK. While the family home is traditionally understood as a monolith, both in its social and spatial structure, this research project explores domesticity as an expanded system of kinship applicable to many other forms of communal living. In addition to the nuclear family, this ranges from intergenerational households, co-parenting and shared custody homes, to platonic cohabitation, communal child-rearing, and intentional communities. In exploring these configurations, this research project aims to challenge dominant narratives of domesticity and raise urgent questions about how architecture can support diverse ways of living.

Lectures will be on Tuesdays from 1pm - 2pm.

Edward Jones CBE Tuesday 14th October 2025
Edward Jones trained at the Architectural Association and along with Jeremy Dixon,
Christopher Cross and Michael Gold formed ‘the Grunt Group’. In the early 1970s they designed the Netherfield housing neighbourhood of Milton Keynes. In 1989 Edward co-founded the practice Jeremy Dixon Edward Jones known for the Darwin College Study Centre in Cambridge and work on the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Opera House. He was a member of Pentad Housing Association along with Neave Brown, Tony Hunt and Michael and Patty Hopkins, and lived in their experimental housing scheme Winscombe Street (designed by Brown).

Dr Helen Charman Tuesday 18th November 2025
Helen Charman is a Fellow and College Teaching Officer in English at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Her recent book Mother State, A Political History of Motherhood has received wide critical acclaim; ‘A provocative and wide-ranging study of ‘motherhood’ in all its iterations…’  (Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian). Her critical writing has been published in the Guardian, The White Review, Another Gaze, and The Stinging Fly among others. As a poet, Charman was shortlisted for the White Review Poet's Prize in 2017 and for the 2019
Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment. Charman volunteers as a birth companion in Glasgow.

Adam Kahn Tuesday 20th January 2026
(date tbc)
Adam founded Adam Khan Architects in 2006. He is a town architect, teacher, lecturer, and critic with a distinct and active voice in public life. He is currently a member of the LLDC Design Review Panel, a Mayor’s Design Advocate, and Town Architect for the Royal Borough of Greenwich. Adam was a squatter himself in Bonnington Square, Lambeth. His Tower Court housing project, the country’s first council housing project built specifically with the needs of the Haredi community in mind, is shortlisted for the Neave Brown Award 2025.

Rachel Bagenal  Tuesday 10th February 2026
Rachel is Director of Development and Regeneration for the Royal Borough of Greenwich, she is the founder of Naked House, a not for profit developer building pared-back affordable housing that allow the owner to fit out and extend by themselves.  At Hackney Council she
was the client for Adam Kahn's Tower Court housing.