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:And that was a big, that day changed everything. I jumped on a bulldozer and with James and we stopped the bulldozer destroying this little woodland. And James and I came home and we made this big banner that said, ‘Imagine this place as a home, a woodland or a motorway’ or something like that. But it was a very, very long banner. And then came up the next day and put it up. And then I was like, okay this is what I want to do. This is theatre. This is performance. This is putting your body at risk. This is exactly the same things as I was doing on the performance art except it meant something, it had a sense, it was really, you know- And the audience were local people. The audience was the TV. And it changed things and it mixed the poetic and the pragmatic and yes, and I found my world after years of not feeling politically active. Or not feeling that it was, what I was doing really was changing things. So I decided from that moment onwards that I would apply all my creativity to social movements.British Library catalogue number: C2037/72 Project clip number: 90