Cheers StP

As Pete said, it was an open training session but the idea behind it was as a ramp up event towards the health and safety certificate. It was an event prompted by the Council rather than Saints. Presumably the Council wanted to test out their very flashy bridge prior to our first game against Widnes when I would imagine a lot more fans will be crossing it!

Stayed in my local patch in the south stand on Friday. Anybody know if it's possible to walk all around the inner stadium Under the stands. I should imagine the central south stand is out of bounds at some point, but I,m not sure.

Stadium was great, as expected, bar very close to my seat - all good! shame all of that was overshadowed by a bridge with flashy lights, thats just freakin awesome!

Is it not going to be mounted on the two white supports, rather than inbetween them?

Yes, you could walk right around the stadium using the concourse. I didn't know this on Friday night so did as you did but my Dad explored all the way around. I was really annoyed with myself that I didn't just go for it and see if I got told off!

On a match day I can't see people being allowed to wander from one concourse to another as on Friday.

Great stadium , nice to have real toilets (even if the hand dryers are the worlds weakest ) .

Are we putting more cladding in ? it looked like some people might get a bit damp if we dont.

The stadium design means fans have to be able to move between certain parts of the ground.

For example there are no turnstiles in the West stand, instead there is a joint turnstile block for the South stand and the West stand. There is therefore no way of separating fans out. At the very least therefore fans in the South and West stands will be able to mingle.

I suspect in certain games when clubs with fans who have a more negative reputation turn up there will be limitations placed on people moving from the East (away) terrace, however in general i suspect it will be pretty much open season.

If you look at the stadium design, the concourses are way above legal specification in terms of design capacity. This is particularly the case with the North stand. So to me that indicates that the club have taken into account the likelyhood of fans wanting to meet up at half time for a chat.

For example the North stand concourse size to meet legal requirements concerning capacity should be 1169 metres squared, yet actually is 1641 square metres in area. The West concourse legal requirement is for an area of 973 metres squared , yet actually has 1334 metres squared.

The rules on new stadiums is that they should accommodate in their concourses no more than 20 people for every 10 square metres of room, with the concourses total capacity being 50% of the stands actual capacity at a minimum.

Hence for the west Terrace it should be able to hold 1946 people, which would be what you would expect from a stand designed to accommodate 3800 people
The West stand concourse has been designed to hold 2668 people which is more in line with a stand capable of holding 5200 people.

Similarly the North stand needed to have a concourse capable of holding 2338 people as thats around half of the total stands capacity in seats, however it actually has a capacity of 3282. Which is more in line with a stand holding around 6400 people.

So according to those concourse surface areas this means the stadium could possibly have the stands cantilevered out to provide a stadium capacity of around 24000 if needed in years to come.

I would not go as far as that, because there are a lot of ifs and buts in that, surrounding things like structural strength and the extent of the foundations for the stadium.

However i do know from looking at the stadium plans that the terraced area crowd capacity has been set at approximately 80% of actual legal limits as set by the Stadium Green guide.
This therefore suggests that Saints may be able to get an increase of a 1000 or so for each terrace purely by maxing out the legal limits on crowd density. The fact the concourses are built with wiggle room in mind, suggests they have thought of this when building the stadium.

By opening the terraces at just 80% design capacity Saints should ensure that all fans can be comfortably accommodated in the terraces, rather than go for a PR disaster as at Warrington, when they sold 14200 tickets for their opening matches , only to discover that this was an unsafe level of spectator density. As a result Wire had to face the embarrassment of having capacity cut from 14200 to 13000.

CM, you know the real reason.
The authorities realise that the speccies (particularly) at the Saints End need "a little more room" than is normal.

PR disaster? Embarrassment?

After the first game it just hasn't been an issue.

It wasn't resolved after the first game. Everytime we went to the HJ it was packed on the west terrace and people were standing in the aisles. It was not a pleasant experience.

Being that tightly packed in with other Saints fans, yes, i can see why the experience was not pleasant