From a distance, the new Wembley Stadium looks like a stately cruise liner forced by rough seas to dock in some tatty West African port. With its gleaming surfaces and huge vaulting arch, the stadium is all glamour, yet it is moored in a desolate landscape littered with kebab shops and second-hand car dealerships, with the muddy waters of Neasden and Dollis Hill lapping at its hull.
Even as you walk closer, appearance and reality keep clashing against one another. It looks magnificent. Yet across the dazzling expanses of metal and glass, there are also little yellow dots swarming like ants. In their hard hats and yellow jackets, the builders are still hammering away to get this beast finished. Deadlines come and go. The 2006 FA Cup Final? No. The coming football season? No. 2007? Maybe. Like a bride-to-be having second thoughts, Wembley doesn’t really want to commit to a date any more.
‘How’s it going?’ I ask Kevin, who is laying bricks for what one day will be the pathway leading from the Tube into the stadium. ‘Same as most sites,’ he replies.
‘Anyone got any idea when it might be finished?’
He shrugs. Anyone who’s ever employed a builder will recognise that shrug. With a flick of a tattooed shoulder, two messages are neatly conveyed. It’ll take longer than planned. And it’s going to cost you.
And indeed it will. Lord Foster’s design for the new Wembley is as eye-catching and impressive as most of his work. But the 90,000-seat stadium has already run wildly over schedule. It had a budget of £757 million, making it the most expensive sports stadium in the world. It is bogged down in delays and legal battles. The Australian company building it has been brought low.
Travel just a few miles down the road, however, and there is a very different story. When the new season kicks off next month, Arsenal will be playing in the sleek new 60,000-capacity Emirates Stadium, which came in on budget at £357 million. There have been arguments about policing the local streets on match days, but nobody is suggesting the Gunners will have to borrow a corner of Highbury Fields for their first game of the season.
This is, in effect, a tale of two stadia — but what’s the difference between these two projects, and what does it tell us about the ability of the British to build world-class buildings?
For a country that once prided itself on the genius of its structural engineers, we have come to be suspicious of large-scale building projects. In the last couple of decades they’ve tended to be more Bob the Builder than Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Channel Tunnel has never recovered from the vast cost of its construction. The Dome chewed its way through almost £800 million. Up in Edinburgh, the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood cost more than ten times its original £40 million estimate. When the new British Library finally opened in 1997 it was three times over budget and five years late.
In the late 1990s Sir John Egan, former chairman of the airport operator BAA, led a government inquiry into why the British had become so useless at building projects. BAA’s own Terminal Five project at Heathrow is one of the very few which is expected to come in on schedule, but sadly no lessons seem to have been passed on to the team responsible for Wembley.
By the late 1990s the old Wembley was looking distinctly dog-eared. For the Football Association, high on all the cash swilling into the game, it seemed only fitting that the sport should have a new home. And that’s where the trouble started. The FA bought the old building; Ken Livingstone made an emotional plea for a ‘national stadium’ to remain in London; the Lottery chipped in £120 million to help buy the site, a decision later described by a parliamentary committee as ‘a cavalier and egregious use of public funds’. A new company, Wembley National Stadiums, was set up to mastermind the project — and from the start it spun out of control.
There were two big mistakes. First, an extravagant design; take a look at the comparisons. The new Arsenal stadium will seat 60,000 fans at a cost of £357 million — just under £6,000 per seat. The Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, which itself ran a third over budget, cost £127 million to build and holds 74,500 fans — a modest £1,700 per seat. And Wembley? Even allowing for no more cost over-runs, it is costing £8,400 per seat including local transport improvements. In most industries you get economies of scale — build a bigger plane and the cost per seat comes down. But not at Wembley.
Next, its construction was handed to an aggressive and hitherto very successful Australian company, Multiplex, that was looking to break into the British market. Multiplex founder John Roberts died in June, with A$350 million wiped off his personal fortune as a direct result of his decision to build Wembley. The company has issued five profit warnings and its shares have slumped as the scale of the disaster unfolded.
It would certainly have been better to go for a contractor with a surer feel for how the building industry works in this country. Multiplex complains that it has had to deal with more than 200 design changes. It has been embroiled in a complex legal dispute with its steel contractors, Cleveland Bridge — which in turn complained in court about being treated like ‘a whingeing pom’. Certainly, if Wembley chief executive Michael Cunnah was meeting Multiplex on the pitch, the ref would have been flashing red cards by now. The two sides persist in blaming each other for the delays.
It didn’t have to be that way. Arsenal has managed to complete its stadium according to plan. True, it’s slightly smaller. But it’s a football ground. It’s in North London. It’s new. How different is that?
Arsenal got three things right. It kept decision-making simple — the project was driven by the club’s managing director Keith Edelman, former boss of the Storehouse retail group. It chose HOK Sport, an American firm that specialises in building sports stadia, as the designer. (HOK is also working on Wembley, but in association with Foster.) And it selected a British building firm, Sir Robert McAlpine, which also built the original Wembley Stadium in the 1920s. The result? Arsenal’s stadium was built in two years, while Wembley is still waiting for a completion date almost four years after demolition began on the old building.
The British can build stadia (and airports) just as well as anyone else, but only it seems when the projects are wholly in the private sector. Stray close to the public sector — Wembley is after all the National Stadium — and the project falls apart. At Wembley, there has been political meddling and management confusion. The FA is run by committee, scared of the media, scared of government, scared of decisions. Building the stadium has been approached with the same foresight and planning that gave us Glenn Hoddle, Kevin Keegan and Sven-Göran Eriksson as the last three national coaches.
And throughout there has been a deadly attitude that, in creating something so important, it hardly matters how long it takes or what it costs. ‘Would it be the end of the world if it wasn’t completed in time for that?’ said Lord Foster languidly, when it was announced the stadium wouldn’t be ready for the FA Cup Final. ‘This building is going to be around for many, many years.’
Well maybe it doesn’t matter to him. But it matters to the fans, to the builders, to the people paying the bills. No doubt when the stadium is finished, it will be magnificent. There will be triumphs on its turf, and fiascos. But it is unlikely that even the England football team will ever manage a disaster quite so complete as the construction of the stadium itself.
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