Sport Is Nothing Without Supporters

Designing a modern stadium isn’t just about seats and turnstiles, concourses and ticket offices, bricks and mortar, without the visitors, as we are seeing currently with the Coronavirus concerns, it’s an eerie emptiness. To many fans, you’re creating a place which has to feel like home. To some, it’s their equivalent of a cathedral. At the very least, you’re building a state-of-the-art entertainment centre, and advances in engineering today give clubs an opportunity to enhance what they can offer beyond what was thought possible even 20 years ago. For the modern club, you’re also creating a revenue stream beyond football. Buro Happold draws on over 20 years of experience in this field, with the only dedicated sports department outside of the U.S., consisting of more than 60 engineers devoted to the sector. From concerts to conferences, a stadium is a local centre which should be an attractive proposition for others looking for an event venue.

Tottenham’s move along White Hart Lane was carefully designed with all this in mind. Here, Buro Happold’s project lead Rob Amphlett talks about a few of the innovations the design engineering consultancy helped deliver at the Premier League’s newest ground.

A world first retractable pitch solution

The stadium plays host to two of the most loved and highly skilled sporting leagues in the world, but as we saw last year, taking a ‘one size fits all’ approach can cause problems. Many football fans will remember the poor state of the Wembley pitch last season as Spurs played Manchester City several days after an NFL game at the ground. A key requirement of the new Spurs stadium was its suitability for both sports, making the retractable design of the football pitch, which makes way for a separate NFL surface underneath, a necessity. With this solution, we could be certain pitch quality problems don’t occur – for either sport.

Retractable pitches have been done before, but none quite like this. In a world first design, collaborating with Nick Cooper and specialist moving systems firm, SCX, we engineered the upper soccer pitch to split into three parts before being rolled away and moved into a storage area in the car-park below the south podium. The three pieces, each weighing over 3,000 tonnes, make way for a dedicated NFL pitch positioned 1.5m below the first row of seating. The lower height of the second pitch is crucial – in NFL games players stand pitch side, so at most UK stadiums hundreds of seats across the bottom rows would have obstructed views. The lower height of the NFL pitch prevents this, meaning the capacity of the stadium remains the same without damaging sightlines for fans.

Research of retractable pitch designs around the world was undertaken by Buro Happold before the three-part solution was agreed on, followed by months of digital prototyping and then testing at the Spurs training ground to verify the design. Careful testing was of the environmental conditions was also necessary to ensure the long term sustainability of both pitches, guaranteeing the viability of something which had never been tried on this scale before. This resulted in a complex system LED grow-lights, a dehumidification system and an irrigation and cooling system to maintain the grass quality while the upper pitch is in storage.

In a process taking just 25 minutes, 68 electric motors roll the upper surface away to a ‘pitch pocket’ underneath the South Stand. Rails in the lower NFL surface provide the infrastructure for rolling the upper surface away, while having no adverse effect on the artificial surface. The rails are then covered with strips of artificial turf, with the joins in both surfaces being undetectable during matches.

In previous UK games, the high-octane NFL matches damaged surfaces which needed to be used for Premier League or international football not long afterwards. At Tottenham Hotspur, as NFL players play on their own artificial surface, the football pitch sits safely underneath the South Stand, with no detrimental effects due to damage or storage.

The success in staging both events has led to the stadium being chosen to host the next UK heavyweight boxing fight between Anthony Joshua and Kubrat Pulev, scheduled for later this year, following on from Wembley Stadium’s lead in bringing the sport to audiences on an even bigger scale. The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was also due to host the now postponed ‘Showdown’ between fierce rugby union rivals Saracens and Harlequins, in a move that provides further revenue opportunities due to the success of the stadium design and the potential it offers.

A home advantage

The most famous stands in the world are known for their partisan atmospheres – walls of noise which drive a home side forward. Tottenham’s South Stand, a 17,500 all-seater terrace, was designed with Dortmund’s famous ‘Yellow Wall’ in mind. Working closely with Dale Jennins from Populous and Mark Murphy from Vanguardia, the bowl shape of the stadium has been shaped to aid the acoustics with noise reverberating to allow the main crescendo in the stadium to come from within. As the largest single-tier stand in the UK, the focus was on creating a cauldron of noise – an engine room for the stadium’s atmosphere. Hospitality areas were deliberately located in other areas of the ground, making the South Stand a terrace reserved purely for home fans enhancing the intensity of the noise. The result is a completely partisan stand reaching upwards, located just five metres from the pitch. The vast stand, which houses more than a quarter of the stadium’s fans, is supported by two plate steel ‘trees’, 49 metres high and each weighing 262 tonnes. These engineering creations provide a space for a food-court with the longest bar in Europe in a vast column-free space below the stand, while allowing the sliding pitch to retract in the car park at ground level below.

A birds-eye view

The stadium’s cable net roof is a key feature in itself. The initial design for the roof was designed with interconnected steel trusses, but it was thought this structure would have a negative impact on the stadium’s key hospitality spaces at the back of the upper bowl known as the Sky-Lounges. Instead, the more slender and lightweight cable net roof was chosen – a radial cable structure made up of 54 segments, similar to a bicycle wheel – this maximises views to the pitch and provides a breath-taking structure that appears to float above the seating bowl below.

Later this year the Sky-Walk is also due to open – a visitor attraction that allows you to walk up the outside of the stadium, through a purpose built walkway in the cladding, and over the top of the roof. This gives you both a birds-eye view through the roof edge glass down to the home goal line plus incredible views back across London from the highest vantage point in the stadium.

Inclusivity

At the heart of the design was the need to make the stadium accessible and inclusive to all. As part of our research to ensure this, we worked closely with groups such as the Disabled Supporters Association and Level Playing Field to examine the matchday experience – taking into account web accessibility, the design of concessions and sensory rooms.

At the old White Hart Lane stadium, there were approximately 100 wheelchair viewing positions, with about 60 people on a waiting list. The new stadium incorporates space for 254 positions – meaning fans who previously had a barrier to watching can now be right in the heart of the action. Fan safety was a primary concern, and, working closely with the design team, we developed an evacuation-by-lift strategy to ensure everyone has a safe, swift route to the exit in the event of an emergency.

The new Spurs stadium was designed to be world leading. Through focusing on design aspects of the stadium that enhance the fan experience, the Buro Happold team has delivered a result which we are confident fans will agree is best in class. The atmosphere, comfort and stadium experience is there; once we can beat the fight against the Coronavirus and the sporting calendar can resume, for Tottenham fans at least, the rest will be up to Mourinho and his players.