Chris Church

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:Saskia Papadakis: Was there a tipping point for you when it came to environmental activism? You’ve gone quite quickly from saying you weren’t really involved, to being like, “I was an activist.”Chris Church: Well, I mentioned the Peter Taylor meeting.Saskia Papadakis: Yes.Chris Church: From there, I got sucked into an early… national campaign emerging called the anti-nuclear campaign, which was funded by the National Union of Miners, and was meant to be a purely anti-nuclear power campaign. It was going to involve all different sectors, it was one of the first coalition-type campaigns. So, I was actually one of the people who helped form the Oxfordshire Anti-Nuclear Campaign, OANC. We actually got a bit of a coup, because someone leaked us a copy of a Central Electricity Generating Boards discarded plan, they never actually- And it literally arrived; it had been torn up, and it was a 30-page document and it had talked about the plans for a nuclear power station at Didcot, which no one knew anything about. That was bloody madness they would never have built it. The type of nuclear power stations they needed then needed so much cooling water, which is why they’re all built near the sea. Building one upstream from Reading and London would never have happened, but, it got us on the front page of the Oxford Times for the first time. I think I’ve still got the poster from the hoardings, ‘N-Plan for Oxford’!.So, because I was the person who fronted that, I then became more involved, and other people would say, oh, yes, come and do this, come and do that. It was like new doors opening and this is really interesting stuff and I was reading quite a lot about it and I thought this was what I want to do.British Library catalogue number: C2037/01 Project clip number: 37