Old Trafford is reaching the end of its 115-year life and Manchester United Football Club has announced plans to build a new stadium adjacent to it, with steel being one of its core components.
Manchester United co-owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, set the British architect Foster + Partners the brief to create the finest football stadium in the world. That means putting the fans first and providing clear sightlines to the pitch and brilliant acoustics.
To achieve this, Foster + Partners plans to build a huge canopy made of glass and steel and held up by three masts standing at 200m tall, making it the tallest structure in Manchester.
These masts will be fixed around the main stadium to enable the canopy to cover the stadium and a public plaza around it, twice the size of London’s Trafalgar Square. This vast glass and steel canopy will shield fans from the sun and rain, harvest rainwater and generate solar energy. Once complete the new stadium should hold 100,000 seats, making it the largest stadium in the UK and the second largest stadium in Europe, after Barcelona’s Camp Nou.
No start date has been given for the scheme, but the plan is to get it built in five years, halving the typical 10-year timeline for a UK stadium construction, this is because the design uses modular construction. Many of its 160 prefabricated components will arrive via water on the nearby Manchester Shipping Canal.
Foster + Partners has also been charged with redeveloping the whole of the Old Trafford Stadium District, which covers the land the club owns around the existing stadium. This could lead to the construction of up to 17,000 homes. Lord Foster, Founder and Executive Chairman of Foster + Partners, said: “As a proud Mancunian, I am passionate about the chance to rebuild on Manchester’s great industrial heritage, creating a vibrant new mixed-use community, served by highly sustainable and improved transport links, providing homes and jobs for the local community, all catalysed by a world-class stadium for the world’s most famous football team – Manchester United.”
There are still a lot of questions to be answered surrounding planning and paying for the scheme, but one thing is for certain, steel will be at the core of Manchester United FC’s ‘New Trafford.’
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