Some jobs happen at fifty miles an hour. Passenger Seat records and preserves the working lives of people whose place of work is a vehicle. We interview them at length, archive the recordings in full, and publish them here.
The project began in 2019 with a single recording made in a lorry cab at Markham Moor. There are now forty-eight interviews in the archive, six of them published in full.
Recordings are made with consent, kept unedited in the master archive, and returned to the subject before anything is published. Nothing is anonymised without being asked for.
- 48interviews recorded since 2019
- 6published in full so far
- 312hours of audio in the archive
- 19counties and regions covered
From the collection: Ray Attwood
Read the full recordRay Attwood has driven the same overnight freight route between Immingham and Dover for twenty-two years. He was the first person we recorded, in a truck stop car park, and he remains the clearest statement of what this project is for.
He is not unhappy in his work and would be irritated by any suggestion that he is. What he describes instead is a very specific expertise — an intimacy with one strip of road that has no application anywhere else in his life and will end when he retires in three years.
You'd think you'd stop seeing it. Twenty-two year on more or less the same run, you'd think it'd all go grey on you. It doesn't.
Ray Attwood · Recorded March 2025
Catalogue record
PS–147 · Recorded 12 March 2025 at Barton-upon-Humber. Duration 2 h 14 min. Four excerpts published; master held in the archive.
Recent recordings
The full archive| Ref. | Recorded | Subject | Occupation | Region or route |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PS–152 | 2025-06-04 | Sheila KerrNinety miles, forty-odd houses, and the customers she is deliberately late for. | Rural post driver | Caithness |
| PS–141 | 2025-01-28 | Dee KavanaghTwelve years of working in a moving room, and a map of the city she can no longer drive through normally. | Emergency ambulance technician | Merseyside |
| PS–132 | 2024-11-19 | Marcus BelloNine years on the night network, and the four o'clock hour when the road belongs to him. | Night bus driver | North London |
Themes
All themes
How an interview happens
Four steps, no cost, and nothing is published until you have heard it and agreed to it.
You get in touch
An email or a phone call. We ask what you do and roughly how long you have done it. There is no audition and we have never turned anybody down.
We agree where and when
Almost always somewhere you choose — a kitchen, a depot canteen, a lay-by, occasionally the vehicle itself. Sessions run between one and three hours.
We record
One interviewer, one recorder, no crew. It is a conversation, not a questionnaire. You can stop it at any point and you can say things off the record.
You approve it
You receive the full audio and the transcript. Nothing goes on this site until you have read the page and said yes to it, in writing.
The archive only exists because people agreed to sit down and talk.
If your work happens on the road — in a cab, a van, an ambulance, a coach or a bus — we would like to record you. If you would rather do the recording than be recorded, we train interviewers twice a year.