An Oral History of the Environmental Movement in the UK: 1970 – 2020
Welcome to the website of the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project (OHEM for short). The project was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council between 2022 and 2025. This website documents the aims, methods, activities and outputs of the project, providing a guide to anyone interested in using the materials we have created.
From 2022 to 2025 the project team worked on the creation of an accessible high-quality national archive of oral history recordings with environmental activists and policy-makers in the UK over the last fifty years. By so doing we seek to create a valuable resource for the future, documenting the history and lived experience of environmental campaigns through the words of those most intimately involved, including those whose contributions have been overlooked. This project is a collaboration between Royal Holloway, the National Life Stories Collection at the British Library, the Royal Geographical Society, Friends of the Earth and the Wildlife Trusts.
We have interviewed 100 carefully selected people involved in protests, policies and practical action since the early 1970s, from direct actions at power stations, through parliamentary work, the Climate Act and UN agreements, to developing city farms, cycle ways and community energy. These interviews will be made available to read and listen to at the British Library in summer 2026, and a book based on these stories will be published by UCL Press in November 2026. This book will contain direct links to hundreds of audio clips from the archive.
A public celebration of the OHEM project and its significance for the environmental movement took place at a packed public meeting at the British Library on 23rd October 2025. In addition to talks from the project team, including a range of voices from the new oral history archive, a roundtable of the leaders of major environmental organisations (including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Green Party, Natural England and the Wildlife Trusts) considered the achievements of the movement over the last fifty years and the prospects for the future. For further details of the event, see the Royal Holloway news page.
For a list of project publications and resources, see the outputs page.
