Andy Moore

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:what should I be doing. What’s worthwhile? How do I reinvent myself in a way that I will be content with? And of course, you know, we’ve all got enormous egos underneath. So I had to be a superman-type mission, I had to be saving the planet, that was just something that was coming to me. And then, and I remembered at university, I can’t remember that I did it more than a couple of times, taking piles of newspaper to a Friends of the Earth collection, Friends of the Earth collect newspaper, didn’t know a whole lot- Well I obviously I had read about things that they’d said that it was a pressure group and that it needed to raise money. But I had thought a bit about that. So that was in the back of my mind. And then I’d come home and I was going to see my mates in Bristol and I just happened to get a lift with a guy who worked for the Scrap Store at the time in the city. And the Scrap Store was part of a big Friends of the Earth scheme using the community programme Manpower Services Commission money. And he said, ‘Well you really should, this is the name of the person, you should really come and see them. And this is where they are. Just go and talk to them. They might have something for you.’ And sure enough they did. And they said ‘Well we can offer you on various, tasks on various projects. And we’re interested to open new ones in a similar vein.’ So I said, ‘Oh okay.’ And their main business was collecting newspaper but this time with trucks doing whole cities of course. So I said yes. And they said, ‘Well we haven’t got a job for you now but we’ll let you know.’ And I was working back in the pea factory in Hull. And then I got a letter saying, ‘Oh please come down here we’ve got something we’d like you to do.’ So and they had various projects on. So I went and did. And that, that was- And I found moving to Bristol as opposed to just visiting was very comfortable. I liked it a lot. It had, I sensed a sense of possibility that there wasn’t in Hull.British Library catalogue number: C2037/59 Project clip number: 24