Everton FC’s planned stadium was cited by UNESCO when it stripped Liverpool’s World Heritage Site status in 2021 because of dockside development – but as the project completes four years on, that criticism feels misplaced
A building 240m long by 213m wide by 45m high is a megastructure by any standard. If that structure is a football stadium, it’s also an exercise in fluid dynamics: what other building type expects you to house, service and rapidly move a population of – in this case – nearly 53,000? Everton FC’s new home, then, is at the point where a single object becomes a civic realm.
Once you’ve strolled round the outside of it, you’ve walked a kilometre. Inside, the arrival and breakout spaces with all their bars and restaurants, shops and events venues, are cavernous, the central spectator bowl immense. All this in the service of a grassy rectangle where people kick a ball about in competitive fashion. Such is the power of top-flight football.
The game is all about stats, so here are some more. This megastructure is nowhere near the biggest among its Premier League peers. It may be a major step up from Everton’s venerable former home of Goodison Park two miles or so east, with its sub-40,000 capacity, but compare that with old neighbours and rivals Liverpool FC at Anfield (61,276 after a recent expansion), one of an elite group of 60,000-plus-seaters also including Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham in the trimmed-down former London 2012 Olympic stadium.
For night games the silver top section is lit in Everton blue.
For night games the silver top section is lit in Everton blue. Credit: Tony McArdle / EFC
Way ahead of the pack sizewise is Manchester United’s Old Trafford, at 75,653. Even that’s not enough for the Red Devils, who want to build a Foster-designed ‘New Trafford’ seating 100,000, audaciously eclipsing the national stadium, Foster’s Wembley, at 90,000.
A satisfying structure on a constrained dock site
But at what used to be Bramley-Moore Dock, a couple of miles north of the heart of maritime Liverpool, as marked by the Liver Building, the relatively modest new Everton ground is quite big enough, and expensive enough at a (reported) £800m. Indeed, it took a deal of effort to shoehorn it into its site. This was one of the city’s string of interlinked North Docks, part of a set of five designed by engineer Jesse Hartley that opened in 1848. The stadium stands between the Mersey and the spine road running along the rear of the docks, behind a listed granite-rubble wall with turreted gatehouses.
Here the stadium had to allow enough space on its eastern (road) side for a generous approach plaza, and on its western (Mersey) side to maintain a respectable water channel within the basin linking to the other littoral docks north and south. To build the stadium, the dock was filled with sand dredged out at sea and then compacted. Once construction finished, the linking waterway was excavated, though fixed low bridges make it unnavigable.
West facade. Bringing 1.4m extra annual visitors to the city, the stadium will aid regeneration of the northern docks, extending 2.3km along the Mersey.
West facade. Bringing 1.4m extra annual visitors to the city, the stadium will aid regeneration of the northern docks, extending 2.3km along the Mersey. Credit: Tony McArdle / EFC
Brickwork and metal cladding evoke dockland heritage and allude to the fabric of Goodison Park.
Brickwork and metal cladding evoke dockland heritage and allude to the fabric of Goodison Park. Credit: Tony McArdle / EFC
Beneath the stadium, the rest of Hartley’s listed basin retaining walls remain intact. In the eastern plaza, their restored tops sit flush with the new paving, with original iron bollards still in place.
This attention to industrial heritage, including the restoration of a tall, listed red-brick 1883 hydraulic engine house at one corner of the site and the careful reinstatement of dockside railway tracks, was not enough to prevent the stadium plans being cited by UNESCO when it withdrew World Heritage Site status from Liverpool in 2021 because of development of its historic waterfront.
Now it’s built, was that decision fair? Not in the case of the stadium in my view, which is on a scale, and with a tough, industrial quality, entirely suited to its site. Walking along the dock road towards it, it hoves most satisfyingly into view above the dauntingly long wall which kept the docks a private domain for so long.
Live events can be hosted in the plaza and on steps to the West Stand.
Live events can be hosted in the plaza and on steps to the West Stand. Credit: Tony McArdle / EFC
It is a handsomer beast than most of the cruise liners you find moored at the Pier Head. The concept design by American architect Dan Meis, refined and developed from RIBA Stage 3 by stadia specialist Pattern (BDP Pattern since 2021) with contractor Laing O’Rourke, is pleasingly unusual.
Its curvaceous silver top section oversails a plinth of vertically arranged brick and black metal sections, drawing on the banded facades of the mighty 1901 Tobacco Warehouse on Stanley Dock. While BDP Pattern was the delivery architect reporting to the contractor, Meis (now leading AECOM’s sports division) was appointed design guardian by the club. The fans chant his name at matches, I’m told.
Reverting to a historic stadium form
Early arenas such as Goodison Park or Arsenal’s former Highbury ground in north London, both by Archibald Leitch, the early-20th-century stadium king, simply followed the shape of the pitch, with a stand on each side and across the ends, making a rectangular whole. Many recent football stadia, including Arsenal’s and Spurs’ new homes have gone for an oval plan.
But Everton have returned to the rectangular because of the shape of the site, and although the structure’s curving silvery top section oversails its plinth, it is sliced off at the north and south ends to fit. On the south side, its glazed angled end comes right up to the Nelson Dock. On the north it abuts a very large enclosed sewage-processing plant and another dock. As BDP Pattern project director Jon-Scott Kohli says: ‘We really drove down on the size of things – everything is as compact as we could possibly make it.’
The steep South Stand is intended to recreate the atmosphere of Goodison Park.
The steep South Stand is intended to recreate the atmosphere of Goodison Park. Credit: Tony McArdle / EFC
Concourses incorporate quiet rooms and 95 baby-changing facilities alongside restaurants and bars, all fitted with low-level counters.
Concourses incorporate quiet rooms and 95 baby-changing facilities alongside restaurants and bars, all fitted with low-level counters. Credit: Tony McArdle / EFC
That exercise in space-saving has a benefit when it comes to the spectator bowl. Seats swoop close to the pitch. Especially on the tall South Stand, the rake of seating is as steep as regulations allow: it’s quite a stiff climb to the top if you don’t use the lifts.
A structure ‘wearing its heart on its sleeve’
Up there, you get a great view of the mighty tubular-steel trusses spanning full-width to support the end roofs, while the roofs on each side are on cantilevered jibs. Looking around, you can see that the disabled-access seats with their extra space are in groups dotted evenly around the arena at various levels. The posh western section, with its glazed private boxes and upscale catering, also has an open area with lounge sofas. It’s not just about overall seat numbers, notes Kohli; it’s also about their grading in nine levels from basic to super-premium, so increasing income.
You don’t look for fine detail in a football stadium, though all the exterior red bricks are handmade, mixed, then cast into 6m-tall panels (the constrained site led to maximum prefabrication of components, whether concrete, steel or brick sections). The look they were aiming for, says Kohli, was ‘a building which wears its industrial heart on its sleeve’. That means almost no trim. What you see is how it is made.
The home dressing room.
The home dressing room. Credit: Tony McArdle / EFC
Accessibility is enhanced by lifts to step-free platforms in every stand, and more wheelchair positions than any English club.
Accessibility is enhanced by lifts to step-free platforms in every stand, and more wheelchair positions than any English club. Credit: Tony McArdle / EFC
On the western, Mersey-facing side there is an open terrace outside the main bulk of the stadium: a promenade space when the weather’s good. When it’s not, much of the pedestrian approach is under the skirt of the stadium where there is a system of built-in high-level perforated steel baffles to attenuate the winds that can howl in off the Mersey.
The boost of the Hill Dickinson stadium (recently named for its law-firm sponsor) will certainly accelerate development in what the docks’ owner Peel Group calls ‘Liverpool Waters’, an Enterprise Zone. But for now, you can gaze out south from within the stadium through large windows right along the docks back to the Liver Building. Perhaps they should protect the view of the stadium from the other direction too.
In numbers
Stadium capacity 52,888
Capacity of entrance plaza 9,000
Wheelchair positions 279
Maximum angle of rake on South Stand 33.89º
Sand to fill dock 480,000m3
Credits
Client Everton Football Club
Architects Meis Architects (stages 1–3), BDP Pattern (design development and delivery)
Client design guardian Dan Meis
Main contractor Laing O’Rourke
Engineers and all building performance disciplines Buro Happold
Landscape and public realm design Planit-IE