Ever wonder how Tottenham Hotspur ended up with the best stadium in the country? You suspect architect Christopher Lee's 3am phone calls with Spurs' demanding chairman, Daniel Levy, played their part as the pair debated the smallest detail imaginable.
Unlike Levy, you would not necessarily recognise Lee if he walked down the street, but chances are you will have seen one of his stadiums. In fact, Lee has designed more than 30 arenas on five continents, including the aforementioned Tottenham Hotspur Stadium; the Emirates; and the Principality in Cardiff, which was the first stadium in the UK with a fully retractable roof.
Lee is also leading the work on the masterplan for the proposed redevelopment of Old Trafford and the design of AC Milan and Inter's new home, the Cathedral. Lee, clearly, has his hands full with his firm, Populous, but the architect is 'super excited' by Newcastle owners' wish to one day expand St James'.
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It seems a difficult task: the Milburn and Sir John Hall stands are at full capacity; the East Stand backs onto the listed Leazes Terrace; and former owner Mike Ashley sold the lease to the land around Strawberry Place, which makes expanding the Gallowgate End that much harder. However, encouragingly, the hierarchy want to exhaust every possible avenue to try and find a solution rather than building a new stadium.
That decision has certainly gone down well with Lee, who has watched games at St James' over the years and embarked on a number of tours to take in a ground he considers to be 'one of the great mythical English stadiums'. Perhaps, it is not a surprise, then, that Lee would 'definitely pick up the phone' if the club's owners ever made contact and the Australian believes it would be possible to create a 'really great world-class stadium' to accommodate between 60,000 and 65,000 supporters.
"That's a very sensible aspiration," he told ChronicleLive. "I'm sure that's achievable on the site. There's lots of ways of approaching that.
"I'm certainly not in the detail of St James' so I can't sort of get into how one would do it, but there are always solutions. I think 60-65,000 is a brilliant capacity personally. For a major English Premier League club, it's a really great capacity. It feels the right size to me."
Scarily, though, St James' could have been even bigger. More than 30 years have passed now since city architect Trevor Skempton liaised with the Magpie Group and carried out a feasibility study, which looked into how either a 40,000-seater or an 80,000-seater stadium could be housed on site. Skempton found that the latter could have been achieved, but the pitch would have to be moved a few metres sideways away from the Leazes Terrace as part of a phased development.
However, given the time and expense involved with such a scheme, Sir John Hall, the club's then owner, opted for a swifter design and build solution as £25m was spent on turning St James' into a a 36,610-seater stadium. It was a sensible capacity, but it did not reflect Newcastle's sudden rise from First Division title winners to Premier League challengers and tens of thousands of supporters were ultimately left on the season ticket waiting list.
A plan to build a new stadium, at Castle Leazes, failed but St James' was later expanded to its current capacity, 52,405, in 1998 as another tier was added to the Sir John Hall and Milburn stands. The stadium has not been touched since then but Skempton, who has an intimate knowledge of the site, and is speaking independently of Populous, can see how St James' could be increased in size despite the complications involved.
"The expansion of the Gallowgate End is possible," he told ChronicleLive. "However, unless the leaseholders agree, it may not be able to match the design of the Milburn and Sir John Hall stands, which would require building over Strawberry Place.
"The main issue is Leazes Terrace. As a Grade 1 listed building, demolition is not an option. However, an imaginative solution could involve building higher in multiple tiers and/or incorporating Leazes Terrace into a new covered arcade beneath a new stand.
"This would have to involve exceptional design and conservation skills, as well as careful and possibly prolonged detailed negotiations."
Clearly, stadium redevelopment is a delicate process at a time when building new arenas is already challenging enough. The Emirates, for example, was designed by Lee on a tight, complex site with railways and bridges while the Aviva had the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit) running down the lower concourse and was surrounded by houses at Havelock Square.
However, even in the years since then, huge advances have been made in stadium expansion and Populous are currently on site at Craven Cottage redeveloping the Riverside Stand to almost double it in capacity by essentially building up from the River Thames. In Strasbourg, meanwhile, Lee's firm will soon start work on modernising the Stade de la Meinau to enable a further 5,500 supporters to attend games. These sorts of developments may just give Newcastle's owners hope after expanding St James' appeared difficult when they first did their due diligence on the club's infrastructure several years ago.
"That's part of the journey of saying we're going to stay and redevelop in that there are complexities, but there's always clever and innovative solutions to overcoming those complexities," Lee added. "In many ways, those external complexities make for really interesting buildings and stadiums.
"The Aviva would never be the shape it was if it was on a new site outside of Dublin, but it's all about having a building that's very much rooted to its local site, its local community and the nuances with regards the light and the access. I think that makes really interesting buildings at the end of the day that are very responsive to where they are.
"Expansions are complex but, in a way, they end up with really interesting solutions and, in many ways, better solutions because the buildings are very knitted onto a site. As a creator, an architect, it's very hard to start with a flat site and a blank sheet of paper and try and take everything you had in St James' and replicate that.
"It is achievable and I spent eight years building Tottenham's stadium. Admittedly, it was not the same site, and it had bits of the old White Hart Lane in there, but to get that feeling of being home is really hard. You have to work really hard. Expanding is more complex and harder, but the benefits are huge."
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