Chris Church

This clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. It will feature in a book published by UCL Press in 2026. The full interview, along with the rest of the collection will be searchable on the British Library’s Sound and Moving Image catalogue and the interviews will be accessible onsite at the British Library in St Pancras from February 2026. For more information visit www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Chris Church: I kept pushing really to get into the local stuff, and that was why the Local Agenda 21 stuff was interesting. As part of that, I came across the Community Development Foundation, they had done a big report called Out of the Shadows, about the importance of community-level action, I read a summary of that and it had a really interesting split about the difference between the voluntary sector and the community sector and about how different people saw grassroots action; is it just an adjunct of the national stuff or is it locally-designed, locally-led to meet local needs. There are two ways it can go, and I thought, okay, I’ve done that bit, I would much rather explore the other bit which is all about locally-led.Saskia Papadakis: Sorry, you had done the national bit?Chris Church: The national, this is part of a national campaign, but really saying, okay, what happens when people get to choose? There were organisations, I came across a few organisations, like Communities Against Toxics, that was being run out of Ellesmere Port, which is not a place where many national environmental NGOs would ever go. So, using that and Local Agenda 21 to say, what does this idea of local sustainable development actually look like?British Library catalogue number: C2037/01 Project clip number: 230