The Artist: Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan
Gordon Chapman-Fox creates music for vanished futures.
Working under the civic-minded alias Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, he builds ambient soundscapes from the ruins of 1970s optimism - concrete tower blocks, ring roads, leisure centres, zoning diagrams.
The name is no metaphor. It was a real post-war development scheme meant to reorganise the North-West of England into a modernist utopia.
It didn’t work out.
But Chapman-Fox turns that failure into fascination.
Where others sample the past, he reanimates it - using vintage synths, archival tones and bureaucratic melancholy to conjure a feeling that’s part memory, part mirage.
This isn’t retro. It’s reclaimed memory.
The Record: The Nation's Most Central Location (2023)
The title is borrowed from a 1975 planning brochure.
The music sounds like a 1975 planning brochure.
Just Off the M56 (J13) sets the tone: glassy synths, measured pace, the hum of infrastructure rendered as music.
Rocksavage stretches further - industrial and contemplative, like standing at the edge of a chemical plant at sunset - wondering what this progress really costs.
Daresbury Laboratory flickers with retro-futurism, all circuit-board precision and VHS glow.
And Europa Boulevard might be a love song written for brutalist architecture bathed sodium light.
Each track is a place name, but also a mood.
Concrete memory. Civic melancholy.
You don’t listen to this record.
You walk through it.
Play Now:
🔊 Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube
Start With:
- Birchwood Boulevard - Transit dreams
- Daresbury Laboratory - Clinical beauty with warm circuitry
- A Brighter and More Prosperous Future - An ode to modernist longing
