Perfectly pitched at Seagulls training ground
The Buckingham Group has again proved itself one of the leading contractors in the stadia and sports sector, this time in the construction of Brighton & Hove Albion’s new training ground at Lancing. And once again, Tubosider is providing the attenuation and irrigation systems.
Not much more than two years after completing construction of the Seagulls’ award-winning Amex Stadium, Buckingham is now part-way through the club’s new £30m training facility, due for handover in summer 2014.
The training ground will be everything you would expect from a club which in the last 10 years has matched high ambition with great success, rising two divisions to knock on the door of the Premier League.
Five training pitches are being installed for the first team at the new West Sussex facility, two of which are exact replicas of the pitch at the Amex Stadium, plus seven for use by the youth academy, with one indoor pitch and also a community pitch.
Tubosider is a regular supplier to the Buckingham Group, the Amex Stadium included. This time we were commissioned to design a dual purpose drainage system, one which would harvest any rainwater and enable its recycling to irrigate the pitches.
The system now installed consists of a 700 cubic metre attenuation tank in 1400mm pipe, running over eight legs each 56 metres in length. Next to the attenuation tank is a 600 cubic metre irrigation tank, also in 1400mm pipe, made up of six runs of 64 metres.
Both prefabricated tanks were fitted quickly by the Buckingham’s contractor team under Craig Gordon, well experienced in using Tubosider systems, who was then able to start work at the Group’s next project at Bristol Rovers.
Brighton & Hove Albion’s chief executive Paul Barber says their new training ground and academy is “critical” to the club’s future.
“It completes the infrastructure of putting the club on a good footing to progress in the future and move to the next level. It is a massively important project for us.”
Brighton currently hold the majority of their training sessions at the University of Sussex in Falmer. The project has been going exactly on schedule, particularly important as there is only a very short timeframe in which to have it completed.
It will result in one of the best academies around compared with what exists in the Premier League and around Europe.
“It’s important to attract young talent so we can compete against the major Premier League clubs in growing our home-grown talent,” says the club. “It’s a facility that will attract good first-team players as well. It gives us the ability to train all year round, with under-soil heating, and it enables us to get the best performances out of our players.”
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