Manchester United and Foster + Partners to build a new stadium: ‘Arguably the largest public space in the world’

Manchester United football club has revealed plans for a jaw-dropping new stadium, which Sir Norman Foster, founder and executive chairman of Foster + Partners, the project’s architect, has described as ‘arguably the largest public space in the world’. The stadium will be built close to Manchester United’s current home, Old Trafford, and have capacity for 100,000 fans.

The club’s co-owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has said: ‘Our current stadium has served us brilliantly for the past 115 years, but it has fallen behind the best arenas in world sport. By building next to the existing site, we will be able to preserve the essence of Old Trafford, while creating a truly state-of-the-art stadium that transforms the fan experience.’

Foster + Partners has released conceptual images of how the stadium and its surrounding areas might look, which is, in a word, distinctive. Three masts, 200m high and visible from 40 miles away, will rise, trident-like, from the structure.

In a video released by Manchester United, Lord Foster explains that, acoustically, the stadium will ‘[cultivate] a huge roar’. It will not be a ‘fortress surrounded by a sea of cars’, but ‘open’, contained by what he describes as a ‘vast umbrella’ which will ‘[harvest] energy and rainwater and [shelter] a new public plaza that is twice the size of [London’s] Trafalgar Square’.

The stadium will be ‘the beating heart of a new sustainable district, which is completely walkable, served by public transport, and endowed by nature’, Lord Foster continues, describing this new district as a ‘mixed-use miniature city of the future’. This refers to the fact that the stadium will act as the centrepiece to the regeneration of the Old Trafford area, and of southern Manchester as a whole. The start date for the project, therefore, will depend on ‘how quickly the government gets going with their regeneration programme’, Ratcliffe said.

A project of this magnitude would usually take ten years to complete. Manchester United has announced its plan to do this one in five, slashing the construction time with prefabrication – building large parts of the stadium off-site and transporting them via Manchester’s canal network. ‘It will be a modular build – that means it can be built far more quickly,’ said Ratcliffe. ‘There are yards which specialise in building very large structures, which are then shipped to locations around the world.’ Lord Foster added that construction time would be halved ‘by using the network of the Manchester ship canal, bringing it back to a new life, [and] shipping in components, 160 of them, Meccano-like’.

It’s a full circle moment: during the Industrial Revolution, Trafford Park was the nation’s industrial heartland; now, the very infrastructure that made that possible will pave the way for the Manchester of the future.

fosterandpartners.com