{"id":643932,"date":"2021-12-10T08:00:53","date_gmt":"2021-12-10T08:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.architectsjournal.co.uk\/?p=643932"},"modified":"2022-11-29T13:14:02","modified_gmt":"2022-11-29T13:14:02","slug":"in-practice-fire-safety-in-wilkinsoneyres-new-stands-at-lords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.architectsjournal.co.uk\/specification\/in-practice-fire-safety-in-wilkinsoneyres-new-stands-at-lords","title":{"rendered":"In practice: Fire safety in WilkinsonEyre\u2019s new stands at Lord\u2019s"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is your role at WilkinsonEyre and what recent projects have you worked on?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I lead the sports portfolio: we\u2019re not sports generalists so the sports projects we do are quite select. <\/span><\/p>\n

Before Lord\u2019s, I led on the designs for Cariocas Arenas for the Rio 2016 Olympics: three co-joined halls with 40,000 seats, a\u00a0project we originally won in a masterplan competition with AECOM. Before that I also led on designs for London 2012\u2019s basketball venue and the Liverpool Arena and Conference Centre. <\/span><\/p>\n

We principally work on arena-based projects \u2013 covered and enclosed spaces \u2013 as opposed to Lord\u2019s, which is an open-ground series of individual stands like pavilions in a park. Stadia tend to be in the round, while arenas are very much indoor environments.<\/span><\/p>\n

How do you approach fire design on new-build stadia?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The overriding design criterion in sports grounds is about safety. Whether it\u2019s Liverpool, London, Lords or Rio, fundamentally you are dealing with a mass of people arriving and departing. Particularly since the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, the issue has been framed around the safe entry, egress and seating of spectators in the stands. This is encapsulated now in The Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds<\/i>, known as \u2018the Green Guide\u2019. The difficulty is that there are no building regulations which govern stadium design.<\/span><\/p>\n

A lot of the design criteria on sports projects have to do with the angle of the seating, which is called the \u2018C-value\u2019. Essentially it is the height you see above someone\u2019s head with respect to a focal point on the pitch and it\u2019s geared around safe seating. Legislation (other than the Regs) dictates the distance from a seat to a safe entrance, the number of rows of seats you can have between aisles, row depth and seat width. So how you lay out stadia is very prescribed. Apart from safety, it\u2019s all dictated by sightline and providing the best spectator experience. Interestingly, new stadia design is moving back to safe standing, or creating seats with a rail in front of them to allow this.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Legislation dictates the distance from a seat to a safe entrance, the number of rows of seats between aisles, row depth and seat width<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

However, understanding crowd dynamics is the most important thing. The Green Guide is very detailed in this respect: from how spectators leave their train station on the way to the grounds, to moving through the turnstile, to arriving at their seats. It concentrates on the safe management of crowds of people moving through a stadium.<\/p>\n

What was the fire and escape strategy on the project at Lord\u2019s?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Cricket has changed vastly in the past five to 10 years. It has gone from being a slow game lasting five days to commonly a much shorter format, more geared towards TV, and with crowds more akin to football matches. This affected our strategy.<\/p>\n

We designed two new stands tied into the existing adjacent stands. We created a link between them to allow for horizontal movement, which is important for emergency evacuation, allowing wheelchair users to move from one stand to another, taking the extra stress off our evacuation strategies. The stands contain 11,600 seats over three tiers, increasing the capacity by 2,600 up to 31,180. They have wheelchair-accessible positions, facilities and lift access at all levels. Open stairs and access walkways allow improved access and crowd circulation.<\/p>\n

What were the main challenges? <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The main issue we at Lord\u2019s was to do with firefighting. We were fortunate that the two new stands weren\u2019t very high, but the Fire Brigade wanted us to include the firefighting stairs as enclosed staircases. Through dialogue we demonstrated we could progress with open staircases in line with the nature of the cricket ground.<\/p>\n

How important is having a good fire strategy in sports and leisure projects?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Very important. Ultimately someone is going to manage that building and is responsible for safely managing these spectators. You need to have a clear strategy they can go ahead and implement.<\/p>\n

Typically, in the Green Guide there is a very simple diagram which ranks your building in terms of fire risk. A low-risk building can be evacuated in eight minutes, and the higher the risk, the shorter the evacuation. At Lord\u2019s, we were looking to get everyone out of the ground in eight minutes. Simple criteria govern your escape routes and widths, calculated with consideration of the number of people evacuating through that area. These also apply to the density of concourses and the size of spaces beyond the seating needed for that safe movement of people. It\u2019s a precise science.<\/p>\n

In an arena, there is no phased evacuation, it is all simultaneous. There are different scenarios. For example, evacuation in the case of a fire is almost easier to manage, as it is obvious where the incident is happening. The bigger issues are security risks, such as terrorism \u2013 where you have a shorter space of time to evacuate a lot of people. In that scenario, we planned Lord\u2019s so that everyone would be evacuated onto the pitch.<\/span><\/p>\n

How are fire and escape strategies in sports and leisure design changing?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

There is a notable move to more temporary structures \u2013 a lot of stadia are now trying to increase their capacities with temporary stands. But it\u2019s in the nature of temporary construction that they present bigger fire risks.<\/p>\n

A lot of stadia nowadays also need to work harder to make their money through non-match day revenue, so a lot of the venues are incorporating more multi-use elements.<\/p>\n

The big difference in terms of environmental modelling is that people aren\u2019t in these buildings all the time. For example, Lord\u2019s is only at full capacity for about 25 times a year and so, for them, it is very important that the business model works too.<\/p>\n

Concessions, hospitality boxes, lounges and so on do start to introduce further fire loads into the building. However, in most of these usually large structures, the primary frames have an inherent fire-resistant property, so it\u2019s relatively straightforward to compartmentalise these localised spaces. You just put fire shutters in front of the bars and caf\u00e9s, for example.<\/p>\n

How important is it to test the fire safety of the venue?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

It is people\u2019s unfamiliarity with the venue that is the problem. Training is always an issue. Due to the pandemic, we haven\u2019t been able to test these buildings as rigorously as we would like through test events, when stewards are educated in how to run the building.<\/p>\n

One of the challenges at Lord\u2019s was the increased numbers of wheelchair users and people with impaired mobility who had to be considered. We designed the stands for 1 per cent wheelchair users and 2 per cent ambulant with impaired mobility. The goods lifts double up as wheelchair evacuation routes, so the lift cores must be carefully designed to enable that eventuality to work. It all affects your fire strategy, and you can\u2019t really test those scenarios.<\/p>\n

What lessons have you learnt from Lord\u2019s?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Lord\u2019s was one of the first projects that we did in a fully immersive environment \u2013 through the use of 3D headsets. The way we dealt with viewpoints and movement was designed this way and we\u2019ve learnt from that.<\/span><\/p>\n

The other lesson learnt is about educating contractors. On Lord\u2019s, we had to switch to a steel frame construction to address the programme and, as a result, the main contractor and steelwork fabricator on the scheme weren\u2019t that familiar with detailing intumescent steelwork \u2013 particularly
\nfire protection of bracketry and secondary framing. It was a huge learning curve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is your role at WilkinsonEyre and what recent projects have you worked on? I lead the sports portfolio: we\u2019re not sports generalists so the sports projects we do are quite select. Before Lord\u2019s, I led on the designs for Cariocas Arenas for the Rio 2016 Olympics: three co-joined halls with 40,000 seats, a\u00a0project we …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59337,"featured_media":643957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"ep_exclude_from_search":false},"categories":[721],"tags":[3147,65538,3114,1614],"yoast_head":"\nIn practice: Fire safety in WilkinsonEyre\u2019s new stands at Lord\u2019s<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Fran Williams speaks to WilkinsonEyre director Sam Wright about the practice\u2019s approach to fire safety and safe evacuation on the Lord\u2019s cricket ground project\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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