Archive/Take Part
Take part
Be Interviewed, or Interview
If your work happens in a vehicle we would like to record you. If you would rather ask the questions, we train interviewers twice a year.
Being interviewed
There is no qualification for this and we have never turned anyone down. You do not need to have an interesting job, a long career or a story. Most people who volunteer begin by telling us that nothing much has happened to them, and most of those recordings are excellent.
A session runs between one and three hours, usually in one sitting, somewhere you choose. It is a conversation and not a questionnaire; the interviewer will have read about your work but will not arrive with a list. You can stop the recorder at any point, and you can say things off the record, which stay off the record.
Afterwards you receive the full audio file and a transcript. Nothing is published until you have read the page as it will appear and agreed to it in writing. If you change your mind later — in a week or in five years — the page comes down and the master is withdrawn from access. That is a standing offer and it does not expire.
Volunteering as an interviewer
We run a two-day training twice a year, in spring and autumn, for people who want to record in their own region. It covers consent, equipment, listening, and the specific difficulty of not filling a silence. No experience is required and several of our best interviewers came to us as subjects first.
Interviewers are unpaid, but travel and equipment are covered and the recorder is yours to keep while you are active with the project. We ask for a commitment of four recordings in a year, which in practice is about six days of work.
What we cannot do
We cannot pay subjects. This is a small project and paying some people and not others would change what we get told.
We cannot record anonymously as a default. We can withhold a name, a route or an employer where there is a real risk, and we have done, but the archive is built on attributed testimony.
We cannot promise publication. Around one recording in six is published. The rest sit in the archive, which is where the value is.
We cannot advise on employment disputes and we are not a campaign. If you are looking for someone to take your side, we are the wrong people.
Register an interest
Two fields and a sentence about what you do. Somebody will reply within a fortnight.
Who we are short of
The archive is heavily weighted towards long-haul freight and urban buses. We are actively looking for:
Refuse and street cleansing
Early-morning municipal crews, particularly outside the south-east.
Night logistics and multi-drop
Parcel and grocery delivery on the overnight and early shifts.
Driving instructors
Almost entirely absent from the archive and among the most experienced road users there are.
Rural and island routes
Ferry-dependent rounds, single-track routes, seasonal roads.
One recording, one afternoon, kept for good.
Interviews are arranged around your shift pattern, not ours. We have recorded at six in the morning and at eleven at night.