New kid on the dock: Everton Stadium

A ‘no-blockwork’ strategy means every detail needs to be planned accurately on the construction of Everton FC’s new riverside stadium. Watch the video tour below...

Project client: Everton Football Club Total cost: £555m Contract type: Bespoke design and build Main contractor: Laing O’Rourke Concept architect: MEIS Architects Delivery architect: BDP Pattern Multiple engineering and other services: Buro Happold Facade engineering: Arup Landscape: Planit-IE Construction start: July 2021 Expected handover: December 2024

“And it’s a Grand Old Team to play for”, starts the famous football anthem that Everton FC fans have adopted, giving the lyrics a blue twist (in more than one sense). It’s a line that could apply to the Laing O’Rourke staff working on the Premier League club’s new stadium, currently taking shape on the site of Bramley-Moore Dock in Liverpool. Many of the staff on the project have been working together since 2017 on three high-profile schemes led by project leader Gareth Jacques.

“Most of my team delivered the Manchester Airport transformation programme with me, and Jaguar Land Rover’s design and engineering studio before that,” he says. “We try to keep people together when we move them around,” he says.

And – if you know your football history – you’ll know that Everton has a track record of innovation in stadium construction stretching back to its late-19th century origins. Goodison Park, the ground the club will leave to take up residency in its new riverside home, was the first purpose-built football stadium in England. In 1907, the club built the first double-decker stand in the league and by 1938 was the first to boast four of them. In 1958, Goodison Park became the first stadium to install under-soil heating to melt ice and snow from the pitch.

“I was walking around with Ray O’Rourke. He said to me, ‘What would you do to improve engineered safety on the next project?’ I said, ‘Less blockwork’.”

Fast forward to 2023 and the club is still innovating. With a 68,091-square-metre gross internal floor area and built on land reclaimed from an infilled River Mersey dock, modern methods of construction (MMC) are set to have been used on 70 per cent of the 52,000-capacity stadium by the time it reaches completion in December 2024. The approach means that the stadium’s construction involves no blockwork whatsoever. Jacques explains: “We finished at Manchester Airport and I was walking around with Ray O’Rourke. He said to me, ‘What would you do to improve engineered safety on the next project?’ I said, ‘Less blockwork’. We had a lot of work in the high-level plant rooms and the roof space which was hard to get to and logistically really difficult. He said, ‘Good idea, get rid of all of it’, which is classic Ray.”

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The story demonstrates the firm’s founder and chief executive’s ongoing commitment to the fine detail of prefabricated methods. And never has detail been more important than on this project. The firm took possession of the site – then a 15-metre-deep dock – in July 2021 and is contracted to complete the project in December 2024. If that wasn’t enough of a challenge, the site is surrounded by water and existing infrastructure on three sides. “That made it immediately apparent that logistics would be a critical path consideration,” Jacques says. “The planning of plant, materials and people resources had to be absolutely accurate.”

“I was actually quite glad when we found the first bomb… It showed the client the thoroughness of our approach and procedures”

An operation to clear the dock began immediately. In addition to hundreds of tyres discarded by tug boats that used the dock, 12 unexploded Second World War bombs were discovered. “We had deep sea divers in there 24/7 for three months,” Jacques says. “It was quite a stressful time because the club were concerned that it was taking so long, and it was an expensive operation. I was actually quite glad when we found the first bomb and the army came in to do a controlled detonation. It showed the client the thoroughness of our approach and procedures.”

Over the following three months, the dock was filled with 500,000 cubic metres of sand, with Dutch offshore specialist contractor Boskalis appointed to provide dredging and filling works. A 3,000 cubic-metre-capacity dredger made 144 round trips of 40 miles into the Irish Sea. The sand was mixed with water and pumped into the dock via a floating pipeline before being levelled out by a sub-surface pontoon with a spreader bar. After the sand had broken the surface of the water and reached the required height, a 19-tonne hammer rig compressed it with 40 shuddering impacts a minute. “The glasses of water in the site office were shaking,” says Jacques.

Jacques describes the infilling process as effectively “an elaborate temporary works solution”. The only element of the development that actually sits on the sand is the pitch, with the main structure’s poured concrete structural slabs supported by 2,800 continuous-flight auger piles, which were driven between 10-18 metres into the underlying sandstone. The reclaimed land allowed Laing O’Rourke’s geotechnical subsidiary, Expanded, to access the site and start work in October 2021, with the piling process complete by the following July.

Laing O’Rourke’s team was able to progress with structural work at the west side of the site as the piling swept eastwards towards the former shore. The first twin wall panel, precast at Laing O’Rourke’s Centre of Excellence for Modern Construction (CEMC) in Nottinghamshire, was dropped into place at the north-west corner of the site, just in time for the 2021 Christmas break.

The concrete superstructure works began with the four cores in each corner of the stadium. Precast columns, beams and twinwall sandwich panels were delivered and assembled on site, with thixotropic grout sealing all joints before in-situ twinwall reinforced concrete infills were added. Precast concrete lattice landings were installed at each level within the cores, providing lateral support to the structure with precast concrete stair units stitching each landing together.

Progress on the project is monitored and managed via a digital 4D construction model of the stadium built on a third-party software platform.

First, 3D data from the project’s mechanical and electrical, structural and architectural teams is inputted. Other elements are then added, including mobile cranes, storage zones, fabrication areas, walking routes and exclusion zones. This model is linked to detailed construction programme information to create a dynamic digital twin, showing progress at all stages of the build.

The 4D model allows the Laing O'Rourke team to assess potential risks or clashes in the programme, and identify efficiency opportunities that might not have been seen using more traditional methods. The rolling model can be accessed by the workforce on site, via phones and tablets.

Every two weeks, coordination sessions are held for 100 staff at a time, where a representative of a particular discipline explains what is happening on site using the latest version of the 4D model. “I know it works,” Jacques says, “because they turn up every couple of weeks without me telling them they have to. And they wouldn’t do that unless it helped.”

In the East and West Stands, Expanded installed GASS lightweight aluminium formwork to support suspended 125mm-thick lattice planks with a 175mm-thick in-situ topping. The concrete pour was kept level using screed levels and a rotating laser before receiving a power float finish.

The South Stand is set to provide a single-tier terrace to house 13,000 fans, a design inspired by Borussia Dortmund’s iconic ‘Yellow Wall’. Both this stand and the North Stand sit on the existing historical wharves and use steel rather than concrete for their structural frames. This work started even as the dock infill was still in progress. Lattice flooring was progressively installed to the supporting structure, ready for further concrete pouring later down the line.

A total of 24 steel and 98 concrete rakers were installed, onto which double-stepped 9.6-metre terrace units were craned into place. The materials used for the rakers reflect the respective materials for the stands’ superstructures – concrete in the East and West Stands, steel in the North and South. The decision to use double-stacked units – halving the number of crane lifts – was one of a number dictated by the exposed nature of the estuary’s edge. “A lot of our engineers’ solutions have been to try and minimise the impact of the wind risk and minimise lifting and working at height,” Jacques says.

The team held off installing the pitchside terrace units in the North and South Stands, allowing the assembly of 10 temporary towers topped by hydraulic jacks. The towers supported the roof trusses – two spanning the North Stand and three across the South Stand – during installation. Each truss consists of three 60-70 metre-long sections, fabricated and welded together at pitch level before being craned into place – again reducing the time spent working at height. After the installation of the main trusses, the rafters were installed in frames at ground level with all the infill bracing, links and purlins. After roof panels were added, each frame was ready to be lifted into position.

The stadium barrel roof was designed to ensure the overall massing and volume is as compact as possible, without compromising spectator views. The process of cladding the roof in a mixture of solid and perforated naturally anodized aluminium panels and transparent polycarbonate is underway. The perforated elements mean that, once the roof is complete, the structure will remain partially visible through the barrel cladding.

To improve safety for roofers, a pre-decked solution was developed, allowing the roof decking and roof safety netting to be installed on the ground level before being lifted into place.

When Construction News visits the site, brick cladding is being installed to the facade on the East Stand, which will be mirrored on the West Stand. Again, a modular approach has been used. Jacques says: “The programme would be nowhere near where it is had we done it traditionally. We would have needed 80 bricklayers and they wouldn’t have been able to do much last November and December because it was so wet and windy.”

Half bricks were attached to 8 metre-high panels offsite, and a tablet with augmented reality technology was used to check bricks were in the right place. After being transported to site, a bespoke machine raises each panel into an upright position for installation.

As part of the “no-blockwork” approach, the team has installed prefabricated “plug-and-play” toilet units, manufactured offsite in three-, four- or five-bay units complete with pipeworks, electrics and walls, with the WCs installed on site. “That will save 200 tradespeople working on their hands and knees,” says Jacques. Other benefits include a reduction in waste and deliveries to site, as well as simplifying coordination between different trades.

The stadium has two main windows on the south and north facades, formed using an aluminium unitised glazing system in a “shingle” arrangement. These windows extend from level four to the roof, reaching across the full extent of the stadium bowl on the north and south elevations.

The South Stand contains a wide concourse for home fans that cantilevers from the south elevation of the stadium on huge inclined steel columns. Floating some 12 metres in the air, the balcony is glazed with a sloped curtain wall, providing home fans with a spectacular letterbox picture view of the city centre, the Mersey and the historic docks to the south.

The impact of the stadium on the area contributed to UNESCO’s removal of Liverpool’s World Heritage status in July 2021. But from the inside looking out, at least, it’s a view that, in the words of the anthem, is enough to “make your heart go worrrrrrrrr”.

For decades boarded up, the Grade II-listed ruin of an 1883 hydraulic tower and engine house sits at the east side of the site.

As part of the stadium work, Laing O'Rourke, working with Ormskirk-based Specialist UK Restorations, is bringing the building back to life.

The restoration work has included rebuilding the former station master’s office by sourcing colour-matched bricks from salvage yards to replicate the original look. A new timber roof structure covered with zinc is being added, with a bespoke finial on top of the tower, sealing it from the salt-water environment of the adjacent River Mersey.

Internally, the space has been grit-blasted, allowing a protective coating to be applied to the steelwork, preventing future corrosion, prior to a complete refit.