Everton Stadium’s architect Dan Meis has proclaimed that fans will be “part of the game” in a way that they’re not at so many new grounds when the Blues move into their future home on the banks of the Mersey.
This week, Meis made an emotional return to Merseyside to check on construction progress at Bramley-Moore Dock and, given recent events, it was a landmark visit for him.
Since he last crossed the Atlantic to be here, the skeletons of the stands that will forge Everton’s 52,888 capacity successor to Goodison Park have sprung up, adding an exciting fresh dimension to the panoramic views of Liverpool’s waterfront and while they’re the physical embodiment of his own creations, even Meis himself is taken aback to see their growth up close.
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Two decades ago, the Blues won preferred bidder status and the right to build a waterside stadium some two miles to the south of here at King’s Dock, but they were unable to stump up the cash and ultimately it became the site of the city’s indoor arena. Many distraught Evertonians feared their club had spurned the opportunity of a lifetime and in the following years there was the trauma of the hugely-controversial proposed move beyond Liverpool’s boundaries to Kirkby and, while that too fell through after being blocked by the UK government, after a generation of actively searching, Everton’s new stadium is emerging in front of our eyes.
Given that the first wave of new grounds in football in the 1990s and 2000s were somewhat generic, perhaps now that the intimacy of Goodison can be retained while being combined with modern technology, the best things have finally come for those who wait with the club’s long-suffering fanbase?
This is also the first time Meis has been over since the Blues' dramatic 3-2 comeback win over Crystal Palace secured their Premier League status, a night in which the power of ‘The Grand Old Lady’ was there for all to see. He told the ECHO: “One of my biggest concerns from the very beginning was we’re walking away from Goodison which is one of the great football experiences of all-time and how do you make sure you capture the best of Goodison and the magic of that – and we saw at the end of the season last year how important the fans are to pulling the team along – and that’s another conversation that I’ve got into with the supporters a lot, it’s not just a place, you’re part of the game.
“What we’re doing here will have so much impact on the players and the play on the pitch, it’s all very interconnected. With some of the new stadiums, there was a lot of emphasis on the architecture. Arsenal, Tottenham, they can be big, beautiful objects but to me this was about the magic of football and it’s true in America of baseball too.
“Where the fans are and how they relate to the pitch and the play, can change the entire experience. That’s why this was an opportunity to do something different and then you add in the history of this site with the dock, the brick that surrounds it and the Mersey, all of that plays into this and it creates a place.”
It’s now just over a year since Everton moved in on site and the transformation over that time has been overwhelming even for Meis. He said: “I came when the cores were first poured but this is the first time I’ve seen vertical steel. What’s incredible is that you don’t really get a sense of the scale until it gets vertical like this. Now we’re starting to get the rakers and the corners filled in, how steep the South End is, it’s really fascinating.
“I told Colin (Chong, Everton’s Chief Stadium Development Officer), I was walking around with a smile on my face the whole time because you doing the drawings and while hundreds of people are involved in the design, it somehow feels like it went from some sketches to what’s happening here and most people don’t get a sense of the complexity of all the construction and the sequencing of it, deciding what goes where and when, it’s an incredibly complex thing but then it seems almost magical, it’s there.”
While Meis is quick to acknowledge that it’s very much a team effort, and for the first time in his professional career that goes back over three decades, he’s had regular major input from the fans thanks to his interaction with them online, a £500million stadium – the largest single-site private sector development in the country – is now being built from an idea that started with a sketch that he drew on a napkin and that’s quite a journey. He said: “I know very early, we presented some ideas to the board and some of my earliest ideas were to draw on the history of English football and how stands kind of grow up over time, so a lot of the older English stadiums were kind of quirky and very different, depending on when a stand got built.
“There were some ideas in there which I think were interesting to the board but the chairman in particular reacted to one sketch that was about the idea of the wave and the roll of the water over the dock and that idea was a very rough little sketch on a napkin that then got developed into what we see.
“The great thing is that the fans are sharing with me every day when it comes to progress. I’ve never had that before. Part of that is the change with social media. It used to be that I caught up where construction was up to whenever I would visit, now I get updates almost every day and questions.
“The thing that’s really exciting now is that people can see enough that they can recognise from what they saw in the renderings that this is what we’re really building.
“It’s honestly changed the way I work on the next projects. I’ve never really had that much interaction with the fans before. It was a reminder that this building type, more than any, is something where the fans feel ownership of it, it’s their home. If I design an office building or an airport, they might use it but they don’t feel ownership of it the way the fans feel ownership this. It’s a very intimate thing, even though it’s so it’s so big and complex, everybody feels it at a very visceral level and that’s really incredible.”
For a long time there were plenty of naysayers who scoffed that Everton’s stadium dream by the banks of the Mersey would never come to fruition. Meis’ worldliness in the architecture sector has taught him that there is a huge attrition rate between designs he is commissioned to produce and those that actually make it, but in this instance he believes that the Blues hierarchy deserve credit for their single-mindedness to ensure the move happened.
He said: “I can’t tell you how many stadiums I’ve drawn over the years that for one reason or another didn’t get built. I have a tattoo from Rome, I worked on the Roma stadium for six or seven years and now the club has been sold and the project has gone.
“We’ve overcome a lot of things here, things that you’d have never imagined, from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and all kinds of things that have thrown hurdles at the club. but the incredible thing, and I don’t think any of the fans were truly aware of this, was how committed the club was from the very beginning. This was not an easy undertaking in so many ways, including walking away from a beloved place.
“It was bold, it was thoughtful and was visionary, not only in picking a site that has a great impact for the club but has a great impact on the city and the entire region. The fact that we’ve got to where we are now isn’t about us or the architecture, it’s down to the commitment of the club to do something like this and fans will be the beneficiaries.”
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