Wembley: cash, contracts and confrontation

He will also provide more detail on proposals to halve the £410m loan WNSL originally sought from the City. The financial documentation, negotiations and amendments to the planning application are likely to delay the project for another few months. Some reports suggest that this means that the stadium will not be ready to host the 2005 World Championships.

The newspapers have gleefully branded the National Stadium a fiasco on a par with the Millennium Dome, quoting a price tag that oscillates between £326m and £660m. "Back to the drawing board for Wembley" and "New Wembley a blight on our national pride" were the doleful headlines in December. It was a far cry from the heady days of November 1999 when the final scheme was unveiled and an exultant Rod Sheard, principal of HOK Sport, declared: "We are ready to launch … the greatest stadium the world has ever built." Yet behind the screaming headlines, spats between politicians and sporting factions, the World Stadium Team – a joint venture between Foster and Partners and HOK Sport – says it is totally focused on completing detailed designs for the scheme unveiled a year ago.

If Chris Smith had not blurted out that he did not want athletics, we would have saved a lot of time and energy

Design Team Source

"There has never been a problem with the design. There is no question of going back to the drawing board. It is a question of presentation, of re-presenting it to the City, and of getting a political decision to construct the deck," says the design team source. "It is not a technical thing, it is a political thing." "We are working flat out on all the drawings. We cannot afford to stop. The delay that would cause would be far more disruptive than having to change the design later," says Ken Shuttleworth, partner at Foster and Partners.

Sounding a little weary, Shuttleworth argues that you do not expect to build megaprojects like Wembley without any aggravation. "All the high-profile jobs we do, like Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong and the Reichstag in Berlin, have incredible politics that go with them. It is part of the design process." HOK Sport's Sheard says the funding impasse is not unusual on a project of this size and points out that £40m was spent on legal fees before the £300m Stadium Australia got the green light. "A lot of decisions have been made over the last three years. It is normal, when the financiers get their cheque-books out, that there should be a flood of questions before they sign anything."

Wembley's 200-strong team
About 200 people are working flat-out on the project. Foster and Partners and HOK Sport have 30 architects doing detailed design. The Mott consortium (a joint venture with Connell Wagner, Weidlinger Associates and Modus) has 100 engineers scattered in London, Croydon, Manchester, Sydney, Melbourne and Denver issuing construction drawings and has issued tender documentation for the demolition, groundworks and structural concrete. Multiplex has 30 staff analysing of the constructional sequence for the complex roof structure. And Westbury has been signed up as the steelwork subcontractor.

"The majority of us are carrying on as if nothing was happening, so we don't get diverted too much from the flow of our work," says the source on the World Stadium Team. "Two or three of us are looking at other options for Wembley National Stadium to show to Sir Rodney Walker and the Football Association." This has required little additional work, says the source, as the design team had explored most of the options during the design development. "Most of it involved just getting out what we had done earlier and demonstrating the implications of each option." If, as looks likely, Sir Rodney chooses the option of building an athletics track into the stadium for the 2005 World Championships and then taking it out afterwards, Shuttleworth says the disruption to the design would be minimal. However, it will require an amendment to the planning application that could delay the project for a couple of months.

"It would affect the structure at the base. The lower tier would need re-engineering, as you would lose 5-6 m of lower tier, and would have to put in retaining walls, but it should not affect the overall shape of the bowl," Shuttleworth says. Football could still be played in the middle of the athletics track while the stadium was in this mode, but the seats would be reduced from 90 000 to 75 000. The track would be built on a 2.5 m deck, as opposed to the 6 m deck that would have been built above the soccer pitch in the original solution. "But going back after the World Championships to dig out the athletics track, lay the pitch and put the lower tier of seating back in will be a substantial job," he adds.

We cannot afford to stop. The delay that would cause would be more disruptive than changing the design

Ken Shuttleworth, Foster

Delaying the fit-out of the offices and hotel to shave £25m off the initial capital cost is quite feasible, says Shuttleworth. "We could leave the office as a shell, and the fit-out would relate to a tenant. It is not unheard of. The top of the ITN building we designed was not fitted out for quite a few years until Reuters took it." The tenant for the 10 000 m2 offices was to have been the FA, but the football body moved into new offices in Soho Square, in London's West End, last November. Wembley National Stadium is in advanced negotiations with a tenant for the offices, but is unlikely to announce a deal by the end of the month, when it goes back to the City for funding. The offices may still be scrapped.

Similarly, WNSL was concerned about Hilton group, which had negotiated exclusive rights to operate a 210-bed hotel on the Wembley site. Hilton was understood to be reluctant to build a rival to its existing hotel near the stadium, and if WNSL could not persuade them, it may be scrapped. However, Hilton has just renamed that hotel the Wembley Plaza, so there is room for a major branded Hilton Hotel on the stadium site.

Warming up to athletics
The final possible change to the scheme, the introduction of an eight-lane warm-up track for athletics near the stadium, looks practicable. The World Stadium Team provided Sir Rodney with feasibility studies for three sites adjacent to the proposed stadium where an eight-lane warm-up track could be built, including one that could accommodate a permanent £30m 15 000-seat stadium around the track. This site is on the south-east corner of Wembley, and is currently occupied by light industrial units which would require a compulsory purchase order.

It remains to be seen whether Sir Rodney's decision on the final configuration of the scheme, expected in early February, will invalidate Multiplex's £326.5m construction bid. A WNSL spokesman said: "There will be some renegotation with Multiplex. We have got our QSs going through things now." Paul Gandy, managing director of Multiplex in the UK, points out that they are used to managing disjointed projects with complex financing arrangements. "The requirements of different stadia are very complex. We have done a lot of work after the Olympics to convert Stadium Australia in Sydney for rugby and Australian rules football, including demolishing the end stands and moving their lower part closer in. We know how long funding a project of this size can take. There is an awful lot of documentation involved." The design team is looking forward to getting the project off the ground. The main challenge is erecting the roof structure: the 135 m tall arch it will be hung from is the same height as the London Eye. A spokesperson for WNSL says: "The whole stadium structure is suspended from a network of cables attached at node points from that arch, which acts much more like a bridge than a girder, but holds weight from across a much wider area than a bridge. It has never been done before for a stadium.

"There is lots of geometry to resolve on the roof, to do with rotating the roof to erect it on a tight site. We will erect by rotating it over the top of the stadium from the south side and dropping it down from 140 m to 135 m." Multiplex has been conducting an exhaustive analysis of the constructional sequence for the roof. The firm has also brought in its specialist construction engineer Mark Hetmanski, who worked on the roof of Stadium Australia.

"The hardest thing about the project is that it fills the site. It's the same problem they had with Cardiff. How do you stand the arch up on a confined site? Plus, it is on a hill in a built-up area," says Multiplex's Gandy.