The cost of building the new main stand at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park home ground has soared to £150million – half as much again on previous estimates for the project.
The Eagles have landed: Crystal Palace got a renewed planning permission for the stand in 2022
That’s confirmed in reports in the specialist building press today, as the Premier League football club has signed Lendlease to carry out the construction work.
The report in Building magazine says that the works will not now begin this year, but in 2025, and will take 30 months. The new stand will increase the Selhurst Park capacity by 8,000, to 34,000.
Back in 2018, when the scheme was first proposed, the costs were estimated at little more than the transfer value of Wilfried Zaha… but that estimate has been and long gone, together with the star forward on a free transfer.
Building magazine is reporting that the construction contract has been awarded to Aussie-owned Lendlease, despite the New South Wales-based business having put its British building operation up for sale last month.
Lendlease is selling its UK and US operations, and intends to offload its portfolio of nearly a dozen development projects in London, Birmingham and Manchester.
In the past, Lendlease has built Elephant Park, the controversial residential redevelopment scheme at the Elephant and Castle, Broadgate Tower in the City, the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh, the athletes’ village for the 2012 London Olympics, MediaCity in Salford, and Trump buildings in Chicago and New York.
Building reports: “The contractor has signed up for a [Pre-Construction Services Agreement] on the job which had an initial price tag of £100million but inflation is thought to have pushed the figure closer to £150million.
“Lendlease is understood to have beaten McLaren, thought to have been the favourite, to the job while Building understands that Lendlease’s current status – it has been up for sale since the end of May – has not had an impact on the PCSA.”
Selhurst Park has been Crystal Palace’s home since 1924.
In an update on Palace’s website last month, the club said: “The construction of the new stand will look to be built around the existing structure, with the aim of keeping the stadium fully operational throughout the build.
“A development of this magnitude and complexity, particularly with the need to keep the existing stand open, requires reconfiguration of areas of the ground and careful chronological organisation of the process…
“We are finalising the detailed construction drawings and going out to tender for every detailed area, including steel, cladding, bricks and glass materials, whilst also building a computerised three-dimensional model of the stadium in order to visualise the interior spaces, design and movement of people through each general admission and hospitality area.”
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Lendlease are currently in the process of pulling out of the UK and Europe, and moving all their operations back to their native Australia, so I doubt they will be doing anything at Selhurst Park!!
Sorry, I should have read the full article before I jumped in with my size 9’s!!