Manchester United Football Club’s stadium at Old Trafford is the largest in the UK after Wembley Stadium and the ninth largest in Europe with a 76,000 seating capacity.
In the last decade, the stadium, known as ‘The Theatre of Dreams’, has undergone significant development to not only increase its seating capacity but to improve its conference and banqueting facilities, office accommodation and retail store.
The Old Trafford pitch is surrounded by four covered all-seated stands officially known as the Sir Alex Ferguson (North), East, South and West Stands. Each stand has at least two tiers with the exception of the South Stand, which, due to construction restrictions, only has one tier. The lower tier of each stand is split into Lower and Upper sections with the Lower sections having been converted from terracing in the early 1990’s. The cantilever roof on the Sir Alex Ferguson Stand is the largest in Europe, measuring 58.5m (192ft.) from the back wall to the front edge.
Tenos was appointed by the Club to develop a fire safety engineering strategy for the stadium’s East Stand, West Stand and the North East and North West Quadrant in-fill’s.
Project-led by Adrian Hay who has extensive experience in delivering fire engineered solutions for stadia and other buildings with high levels of public access, Tenos were able to develop a fire engineering strategy without compromising the design or functionality of these stadium developments.
The complexity and size of the stadium, combined with the variety of uses for its associated buildings, demanded a high degree of technical input from the Tenos project team within very tight timescales.
As part of the design stage process we pro-actively negotiated, on behalf of the client, with the relevant approval authorities to achieve early statutory approval.
Tenos is proud of their on-going relationship with this world-renowned club. We have acted as the Club’s fire engineering consultants for more than fifteen years and our advice has recently extended to providing fire safety engineering and fire safety management services for their state-of-the-art training facilities in Carrington.
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