St James' Park today and, inset, the Castle Leazes plans from the 1990s
St James' Park today and, inset, the Castle Leazes plans from the 1990s
To stay or to go? The wait for white smoke goes on yet former Newcastle United owner Sir John Hall suspects it will be worth it.
"They're not daft people," the 91-year-old told ChronicleLive. "They know what they're doing. They will look at every factor - profitability, benefits to the fans, facilities.
"It's taking the football stadium into the next generation. The pace has been set and the club have to adapt. It's how you set yourself into the next stages of basically the great European game. That will be them. It will be beyond my time, I'm afraid."
It is a familiar vision. Sir John, after all, had his own plans to build a stadium that the Geordie declared would have been 'one of the best in Europe'.
St James' Park had not long been expanded, in 1995, when it became apparent that the club had quickly outgrown a capacity of 37,000 seats. In fact, Sir John estimated around 14,000 supporters were on the season ticket waiting list at the time. No wonder the club considered their options.
Talks were even held with Gateshead Council about a site close to the GIS, but Newcastle ultimately favoured a city centre option at Castle Leazes on the Town Moor. The man tasked with designing a state-of-the-art stadium on top of it? Russell Jones, Newcastle's former executive director, who took inspiration from visits to grounds in the U.S. and Europe.
"The retractable roof was in Holland," he recalled to ChronicleLive. "We looked at retractable pitches and all sorts of situations.
"The idea to reduce costs was to sink it into the ground like a Roman amphitheatre. You would walk around the concourses all the way around and then down the terraces to your seat. There was nothing else like it."
The plans were certainly ambitious. Not only were Newcastle planning to build the second biggest stadium in the Premier League at the time - the Magpies had scope to increase the initial 55,000-capacity to 70,000 seats in stages.
Plans for a proposed Newcastle United Stadium. West Elevation, 1997 (Image: Taylor Tulip & Hunter Architects)
The new ground, as Jones pointed out, was to be sunk five metres into Castle Leazes Moor at Spital Tongues with a three-tiered bowl offering uninterrupted views while the roof's two huge arches were a nod to the Tyne Bridge. Paul Joannou, the club's historian, wrote that steel and glass would be used to 'striking effect' as part of the scheme, which was 'designed to an extremely high architectural and environmental standard'.
Construction was earmarked to take two years and the stadium was slated to cost £65m, including £12m for 4,500 car-parking spaces and £13m for fitting out hospitality facilities. The existing ground, meanwhile, would be converted into a multi-purpose indoor venue called the St James' Park Centre as part of Sir John's vision for a Newcastle Sporting Club. This separate £25m redevelopment would house athletics, basketball and ice hockey, and boasted a capacity of 12,500 seats.
The freemen backed the proposals, which would have seen Leazes Park upgraded and the council-owned Exhibition Park replace the lost Town Moor land, while Tony Flynn, who was leader of Newcastle City Council between 1994 and 2004, 'saw the value of the club to the city' and was 'intimately involved in everything'.
"It was a good plan, especially since they would have opened up the conservation area, Leazes Terrace, currently dwarfed by the ground, and made it look splendid," he recalled to ChronicleLive. "The city council and the freemen were excited by the idea.
"There are powers within the Town Moor Act to move things around, to lease some land off, as long as you keep the 1,000 acres that have been there for centuries. That could have been done, but it was obviously a step too far for some people."
Indeed. The 'No Business on the Moor' campaign commanded 36,000 signatures and it soon became apparent that the proposals would have to be referred to environmental secretary John Prescott. The likely result? A long, expensive process with no guarantees. Perhaps, then, it was not a surprise that the plans were withdrawn in November, 1997 as Flynn explained.
"I was involved at the time in regenerating Grainger Town and it showed what you could do in restoring historic buildings and making them a centrepiece of a park, which it would have been," he said. "But, clearly, that would have taken an awful lot of time to get under way. It would have taken many years because there would have had to be a public inquiry and I don't think John [Hall] and others were able to wait for that."
The public look at the plans for the first time in March, 1997
St James' was instead expanded to its current capacity, in 2000, which brings us to a familiar dilemma today. Nearly a quarter of a century on, the club are weighing up whether to transform the stadium or to build a new ground not too far away. Sir John can certainly see the parallels with his time. In so many ways.
"You're building it because the fans want to come," he added. "That's the great thing. They are getting 52,000 every Saturday and the number of people who say to me, 'I can't get a ticket'.
"There is that gap so you have got to gauge how big it is. It's a great dilemma to be in, a great situation."