Sport
The stadium is
scheduled to be ready
by May 2019
Sport in the frame
York’s professional football and
rugby league teams (York City and
York Knights), will both have a new
home to share from next summer
as an 8,000-seat stadium, including leisure
and cinematic facilities, is currently under
construction at Huntington on the city’s
outskirts.
As with many similar high-profile sports
projects, getting the scheme under way
has been a long and difficult process. From
their original involvement in the project
some five years ago, Buckingham Group
was appointed, and started on site, late last
year. It is scheduled to handover the stadium
in time for next year’s rugby league season
which kicks off in May.
Buckingham inherited the site from a
previous project team with the site already
cleared of its previous buildings, which
included an athletics track and a swimming
pool, while all of the enabling works had also
been completed.
“To ensure the scheme got under way
this time we initially undertook a value
engineering exercise of the original design,
streamlining it and making it cost-effective
and buildable,” explains Buckingham Senior
Project Manager Alan Domville.
Working in conjunction with Caunton
Engineering, who are the design and build
steelwork contractor for the project, the
value engineering included a complete
design review of the steel frames for the
scheme.
One example was replacing precast planks
with metal decking in the cinema seating
areas, as it offers a more efficient build
solution for the follow-on trades. Another
was using Westok tapered cellular beams for
the stadium’s cantilevering roofs.
“The original design for the stadium
roofs was for solid UB rafters. By changing
to Westok beams we have lighter and less
expensive members, and ones that are
tapered at no extra cost to give a more
aesthetic appearance,” explains Caunton
Engineering Senior Structural Engineer
Richard Beesley.
Overall, structural steelwork is being used
to form the entire stadium project, which
consists of three main elements; the cinema
block that adjoins the stadium’s south stand,
the east stand which also includes a twostorey
building housing an NHS drop-in
surgery, a library and the stadium’s corporate
facilities on the upper level, and a leisure
block that adjoins the scheme’s north east
corner and includes three pools, a gym and
a sports hall.
All three of these main structures are
independent and separated by movement
joints. These parts of the scheme are all
founded on piled foundations, typically
13m-deep. The remaining parts of the
scheme, which consist of the smaller west
and north stadium stands are on pad
foundations, as these structures are much
lighter.
Steelwork erection began in March, with
Caunton Engineering working on two fronts,
with one gang erecting the cinema and
the other building the leisure centre. The
leisure centre gang then progressed on to the
stadium.
The 13-screen cinema, which includes an
IMAX, measures 44m-wide x 123m-long
and is 24m-high. It is a braced box and sits
above a ground floor retail level, which has
a completely different grid pattern to the
more complex arrangement needed for the
two upper levels. The retail floor features
long clear spans, ideal for shops, while the
cinema’s two floors are a forest of beams
in comparison, needed for the screen’s and
projection room’s partition walls.
York’s Community Stadium will host football and rugby league,
as well as providing an array of leisure facilities and a 13-screen
cinema. Martin Cooper reports.
16 NSC
July/Aug 18
/Leisure_buildings#Stadia
/Construction
/Design
/Single_storey_industrial_buildings#Design_.26_Build
/Floor_systems#Precast_units
/Steel_construction_products#Decking_for_floors
/Steel_construction_products#Cellular_beams
/Construction#Steel_erection
/Leisure_buildings#Theatres_and_auditoria
/Leisure_buildings
/Concept_design#Floor_grids