A plan to downsize the Olympic Stadium after the 2012 Games is “flawed” and “not in the interests of the East End”, a London Assembly committee said way back in 2010 before the London 2012 Olympics were .
The then committee chairman and West Ham fan Len Duvall said the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC) should have carried out an “open and thorough analysis” of various options earlier. He said: “Put simply, an elite 25,000-seat athletics stadium is not, and was never going to be, in the long-term interests of the East End or of the taxpayer”
Fast forward to 2013 and The London Legacy Development Corporation started its search for a contractor to deliver £20m retractable seating system at the former Olympic Stadium. The tender was eventually awarded to a company Alto Seating who designed the seating with SAPA UK providing the Aluminium retractable decks and GallowGlass tasked with the moving of the seats. It was originally budgeted around £300,000 to move the seats.
A case study on The Welding Institute website" “Sapa was contracted to provide seating decks as part of the redevelopment of London’s Olympic Stadium, the centrepiece of the London Olympic Park and one of the venues for this year’s Rugby World Cup. Sapa Extrusions, based in Harderwijk in the Netherlands, had to deliver 3500 retractable decks for the stadium.The seating decks were to be made from extruded aluminium, incorporating joints made using friction stir welding (FSW).”
In 2015 Primary contractor Alto Seating went into voluntary administration weeks before the Rugby World cup owing GallowGlass £712,000 and leaving SAPA to carry on the project alone.
In 2016 LLDC CEO, David Goldstone gave evidence at the London Assembly Budget Monitoring sub-committee about the rising cost of the London Stadium and the impact of the failed retractable seating system.He confirmed an extra £21m was spent on the doomed seating system last year and estimated costs could reach as high £8m per year to move the seats backwards and forward unless a better solution can be found.
Speaking about the increase Goldstone explained: “A chunk of it was to do with the very unfortunate failure of the seating contractor who had been hired to install new seating system that happened just before the Rugby world cup last summer. We were left with a partially installed system so we had to step in and make it ready for that event. The (retractable seating) had been a joint venture, one partner did the main design and another installed the system, one partner went bust and the other partner inherited it but wasn’t a suitable long term contractor. They took it forward during 2016 but we had to settle out with them in 2016 because they weren’t a suitable long term”
On the question of annual running costs of the retractable seating costing up to £8m per year to run Goldstone admitted that was an estimate of moving between football mode and athletics each year. He said it was an estimated cost but it was not a confirmed amount and they were in a tendering process at the moment for a long term operator to move the seats and they just received the tenders in at the last few days. Goldstone confirmed “We are not pretending it’s not an issue but we know what the confirmed costs will be in the near future”
On 1st February 2017 Stadium owners E20 signed a five-year contract with PHD Modular Access Services Ltd of which Project 7 construction is part of their group.
Last month London Stadium seating contractors Project 7 construction published a video on youtube to show how the lower tier seats move from football mode to music concert mode. The video below shows seven rows of seats removed from the East stand before the West stand is pushed back section by section on air skates. The north and south lower stands are lifted and moved in modules by cranes. The north and south lower stands are lifted and moved in modules by crane with the video proudly claiming 500 unique crane lift movements are required for the operation. Possibly the most shocking fact of the whole video is the boast that it takes 32,000 man hours to achieve the full move.
Costs of the new contract have not been revealed despite a freedom of information request from myself but the quoted 32,000 hours at London Living Wage of £9.75 per hour would cost £312,000 per move so manpower would cost close to a million without the cost crane hire and associated costs factored in.
The new five-year seating contract can be viewed HERE
This week Project 8 was busy converting the London Stadium back to football mode following the completion of 2017 IAAF World Championships on Sunday.
Stadium owners E20 Stadium LLP are contractually obliged under the contract with West Ham to return the stadium to football mode by August 25th this year.
In a Freedom of Information response received this week, E20 Stadium says: “All four of the stadium’s stands are scheduled to be in their football positions by the 25 August. The stadium will be ready for West Ham’s first home match on 11 September 2017. Given that the stadium will be in football mode prior to West Ham’s first home match, no breach is anticipated.”
Long gone are the promises of ‘State of the art retractable seating’ which has since been rebranded as relocatable seating.