Audiopile Review: Our favourite artist from the deep Castles In Space catalog, Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, drops a new release, continuing his one-record-per year pace since launching the project back in 2021. Once again, the solo project of Gordon Chapman-Fox soundtracks the UK’s descent from the highs of utopic idealism during the post-war era, eventually crashing down over the last four decades of non-stop austerity. Certainly, we’re in no better situation over here, which is probably why Chapman-Fox’s music resonates well beyond the UK. You can hear that same sentiment of loss in the like-minded music of Vancouver’s own Mount Maxwell. Your Community Hub is able to project both the optimistic and hopeful memories of the quickly fading past, right alongside the foreboding feeling that we’re headed in the wrong direction. Drum machines and sequencers evoke that air of futurism, while his sweeping synths feel like black clouds on the horizon, advancing ever so slightly on the well-trod template set by Pye Corner Audio a decade plus back. We’re probably making this seem more bleak than it is. Sorry, just in one of those moods today. It’ll all workout for the best, right?

Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan’s new album, Your Community Hub, compellingly continues his sonic exploration of the New Towns movement. The issues the councillors, planners, and architects set out to solve still resound and echo throughout society.

For the latest instalment in this unique project, Gordon Chapman-Fox turns his laser eye to focus on Community and the Community Centres that populated Warrington and Runcorn in order to provide all the facilities people needed within a five minute walk from their home. These planning ideas predated the current discussions of fifteen minute cities by fifty years.

Those intervening years have seen a decline in our community centres and services: handy access to a GP or dentist, Post Offices, youth clubs, local shops, banking and much more. Successive governments have undermined and eroded those basic services. The decline in community services has also been matched with a decline in community and shared experiences with a knock-on effect on the population’s health and well-being. The disastrous austerity policies imposed over the last 15 years have exacerbated this long, slow reduction in available spaces for people to meet and communicate, with seemingly no recognition of the societal impact that causes. Short-termism at the expense of the community and how we live our lives.

Margaret Thatcher’s statement that “there is no such thing as society” has been taken as a mission statement by successive Conservative governments who have aimed to remove as much support and communality from the citizens as possible. It continues now, the wrong-headed idea that everyone can be left to fend for themselves.

Chapman-Fox’s latest album decries the cruelty of where we find ourselves in 2024 and his quiet incandescence about the loss of optimism for what communities should be and could be. It’s his most powerful work, and as always, it will deeply resonate with those who tune in to his unique vision and unparalleled productions.

All four WRNTDP albums to date have had increasing critical and commercial success. Your Community Hub will resonate with anyone with a social conscience, anyone who feels how badly the state has let us down.

As ever, beautifully packaged and designed by Gordon, the album artwork features photographs from the archive of the architect Peter Garvin, which was kindly provided by his son Richard Garvin. The photographs show Peter’s work on the Castlefield Community Centre, a sleek modernist structure clad in white ceramic tiles.