Jay Jordan

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:M41 street party on the motorway, 8,000 people turn up. Incredible moment. I push through the police line with Jack on my back. So my son is on my back. And I’m pushed through a police line and I always remember the cop going, ‘How can you take your child into such a dangerous place?’ And I’m like, ‘Er, hang on, it’s only dangerous because you are here.’ [laughing] […] And doing that thing, I learned something amazing. I learned the power of storytelling. And the, to create a movement. So there’s these big, we had these big, well what was her name, Zoe, she makes these giant carnival figures. So very influenced by carnival. Situationists always talked about you know every revolution is like a carnival, the world is upside down. Hierarchies are upside down and everything is possible. People talk to each other. There’s no, less mediation. And we were like, okay well let’s not wait for the carnival to be like a revolution, a revolution to be like a carnival, let’s create carnivals that become revolutions. And there were these carnival figures and underneath the carnival figures were people with jackhammers drilling into the tarmac and planting trees. And the trees had been saved from the M11 motorway.[…]So that moment of drilling the holes in the motorway and planting trees was also like, you know, I had understood through anarchism and through my understanding of anarchism the importance of prefigurative politics. Of showing the world that you want it, that you weren’t just saying no, you weren’t just going to do a protest against cars. But you were, you know, doing something that showed the world you wanted, and that was, you know, obviously symbolic, it was, you know, planting trees in a motorway. And, and it was inspired by the fact that on the text that we gave away in this folder thing, it said, ‘Beneath the tarmac the forest.’ And that story got to the Liverpool dockers. And the Liverpool dockers were, wow! It’s the beginning of the internet. These folk are amazing. This is, you know, and it made me realise that kind of audacious imagination and stories can cross class boundaries. And they decided they wanted to work with us. So, you know, they were, you know, working class, patriarchal dockers working with, you know, ravers, communists, anarchists, weird hippies, eco folk. I mean-British Library catalogue number: C2037/72 Project clip number: 72