Archive/About
About
A Small Archive with a Narrow Subject
Passenger Seat is an independent nonprofit oral history project. We record people whose work happens on the road, and we keep the recordings.
Where it started
In 2019 one of our founders spent a night in a truck stop car park waiting for a recovery vehicle and ended up talking to a driver named Ray Attwood for four hours. She went back a fortnight later with a recorder. That recording is now PS–147, and it is still the one we send people first.
The project was constituted as a charity in 2021. It has two part-time staff, a volunteer interviewer network of nineteen people across the country, and an annual budget smaller than most people assume when they see the archive.
What we are trying to do
The stated aim is unglamorous: to record, catalogue and preserve first-person accounts of road work, and to make them available. Not to campaign, not to represent anybody, and not to argue for a position on wages, hours or automation, all of which are important and none of which are our job.
We are working against a specific kind of loss. A driver with thirty years on one route holds a body of knowledge that is detailed, hard-won and entirely undocumented, and which disappears at retirement without anybody noticing it has gone. Multiply that by the number of people who retire from road work each year and the scale of what is not being written down becomes obvious.
We are also, frankly, working against how this subject is usually handled. Road work tends to be written up either as a crisis or as a tribute. Both flatten the people involved into a category. The recordings are the corrective: three hours with one person is very hard to generalise from, which is the point.
Money
The project is funded by a small heritage grant, a regional records office partnership, and individual donations, none of which carry editorial conditions. We do not take money from vehicle manufacturers, logistics operators, insurers or trade bodies, and we have turned down three offers on those grounds.
Accounts are published annually. The two largest costs are, in order, staff time on transcription and the long-term storage of uncompressed audio.
The project in numbers
Constituted as a charity in 2021. Two part-time staff and nineteen volunteer interviewers.
Forty-eight recordings held, six published, 312 hours of master audio.
Nineteen counties and regions represented; heaviest coverage in the north of England and the Scottish Highlands.
One withdrawal of consent since 2019, honoured in four days.
What Passenger Seat is not
- Not a campaign, and not affiliated with a union or a trade body.
- Not a journalism outlet. We do not chase stories or approach people after incidents.
- Not a hardship project. Many of our subjects are well paid and say so.
- Not a podcast. The recordings are archive material, published in full.
- Not an employer-facing service. We record people, not organisations.
- Not finished. The collection is expected to run for at least another decade.
Forty-eight recordings is not very many.
The gap between what we hold and what is out there on the road tonight is the entire reason the project exists.