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‘What Manchester does today,” Benjamin Disraeli once proclaimed, “the world does tomorrow.” So begins the breathless promotional video for Manchester United’s proposed £2bn football stadium, summoning the words of the Victorian prime minister to launch Norman Foster’s vision for a “mixed-use mini city” beneath a gigantic, three-spired tent.
The only thing is, the world has seen quite a lot of big tops before. There is something decidedly retro about the plans, which depict a vast tensile canopy stretched over the 100,000-capacity stadium and its surrounds, covering what Lord Foster says will be “arguably the largest public space in the world”. Putting something bigger than Tiananmen Square under a tent doesn’t sound like a particularly appealing prospect, but then the Man Utd mantra appears to be bigger is better.
Stretched between three tall masts – which recall etiolated cousins of the Skylon, erected on the South Bank for the 1951 Festival of Britain – the project looks like a vision of the future from another era. It could be something dreamed up back when Foster was a lad in Levenshulme, growing up in poverty while his father laboured at the Metropolitan-Vickers works in Trafford Park, near where his new stadium will rise. The architect lord may now fly helicopters and enjoy homes in Cap Ferrat and Martha’s Vineyard, but for the purposes of this project at least, his northern working-class roots remain strong.
Foster’s festive visuals may conjure thoughts of Zippos travelling circus, but the big tent has an illustrious architectural history. The Russian engineer Vladimir Shukhov was the first to experiment with tensile membrane structures at scale, creating thrilling enclosures for the Nizhny Novgorod Fair of 1896. His work inspired the German engineer Frei Otto to create the world’s first tent-covered stadium for the 1972 Munich Olympics, which remains a stunning, gossamer thing to encounter. Its delicate roof hangs like a series of taut spider’s webs, dancing over the stands and concourse, suspended from tilting masts. It spawned a wave of similar experiments with tensile structures in the following decades, culminating in the big top to end all big tops, the Millennium Dome, designed by Foster’s former partner, Richard Rogers.
Not to be outdone, Foster has already gone one better. The architectural lineage of his Old Trafford fantasy is not Frei Otto’s stadium, nor Rogers’ dome, but his own humungous shopping mall for Kazakhstan’s former president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Unveiled in 2006, the Khan Shatyr stands at the end of the monumental urban axis in Astana, its cable-net roof rising at a jaunty angle to 150 metres, glowing pink and green by night, just as his Old Trafford big top will throb red. It is a pleasure dome worthy of Kubla Khan, housing dodgems, a rollercoaster and an artificial beach, beneath the biggest tent in the world. For now.
If all goes to plan, Manchester could one day own that pleasure dome crown. The images depict an entire world swept beneath Foster’s three-pronged canopy – the trio of masts a reference to the club’s devil’s trident logo. They show vast acreages of concourse populated by crowds frolicking beneath the glossy red haloes of the stands, stacked in shimmering rings recalling Foster’s Apple HQ, while holograms of footballers float around them. Punters sit on grassy steps beside a water feature while a night-time scene shows people dancing on a stage with coloured lights suspended from the great tent, giving it the look of a disco at Center Parcs.
But, just like Chelsea’s grand plans for a brick cathedral of football by Herzog & de Meuron, which was scrapped in 2022, could it end up being a PR mirage, as flimsy as Foster’s tensile membrane? Manchester United is currently £1bn in debt, and the club has yet to say how it plans to pay for the project.
