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Chelmsford Community Radio live from ARU — it feels like coming home

2025-11-05

Never complain about the rain: Ultralab at Anglia, redundancy in 2006 — and nearly twenty years later ARU standing up for Chelmsford Community Radio and giving us a home on campus.

5 November 2025 Years ago I wrote a piece called Never complain about the rain . It was about how I ended up at Ultralab. Wet graduation day. Roger Clark giving Stephen Heppell a lift so he didn’t get soaked. A chat in the car about needing a programmer. And suddenly I was walking into a lab at Anglia Polytechnic University that would define the next six years of my life. Never complain about the rain. Because sometimes the rain is how you get home. Of course the university didn’t only open a door for me. In December 2006 it closed one as well. Ultralab shut. Redundancy a week before Christmas. Internationally respected learning technology centre, gone — two years short of its twentieth birthday. I wrote that rain piece a week after I lost the job. It hurt. Of course it hurt. Universities are big institutions. They reorganise. They shut labs. They make people redundant. And then, nearly twenty years later, the same university — now ARU — quietly does something rather wonderful. It stands up for a community radio station. Gives Chelmsford Community Radio a proper home on the Chelmsford campus. Not a press-release gesture. An actual studio. Space to grow. A partnership with the Facul…

Topics: Community radioLearning technologyReflection

Matthew Eaves — escape room franchise founder, operator, and writer. Also: franchise, posts, contact.