Nigel Haigh

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:Nigel Haigh: Richard Wiggs maintained that the newspapers were all full of how wonderful Concorde was. And that it was very hard to get negative stories and say, you know, it’s a very costly thing, it’s bad for the environment, it’s very noisy, to get that message across. So what the Anti-Concorde Project did was it paid for paid advertisements in The Guardian and The Observer, in The Times. And it wrote to its supporters of whom there were many saying, ‘This is the text of an advertisement which we are going to put, would you like to support it and we will print your name as a supporter with the advertisement?’ And that pulled in the pundits. I mean people paid. And we had very loyal supporters.Toby Butler: Yes, interesting.Nigel Haigh: Some of whom were- I mean one of them was an underwriter at Lloyds. And so he took his, our propaganda material and showed it to his fellow underwriters and said, ‘Look this aeroplane, if it’s allowed to fly supersonically over Britain will damage property.’ And there was clear evidence for that because Concorde did fly across Wales and Scotland and Cornwall on a few trials and it did damage buildings and the Government had to pay out. So that evidence was clear. So he said to his fellow underwriters, ‘Our household insurance policies don’t exclude damage by supersonic aircraft.’ And they said, ‘Oh dear well we don’t want to pay for that.’ So all Lloyds underwriters, all insurers, wrote to their customers saying, ‘We are excluding damage done by supersonic aircraft from our policies.’ When Lloyds did that the commercial insurance companies did the same. So suddenly every single household in the United Kingdom got a letter from their insurers saying ‘We are withdrawing cover from sonic boom damage to property which will happen if these things are allowed to.’ So that, that more or less made it impossible for the British Government to allow supersonic flight over Britain.British Library catalogue number: C2037/50 Project clip number: 57