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CLIEN T Ascot Authority (Holdings) Ltd

ARCHI T EC T Populous

PROJEC T VALUE £127 million

DUR AT I O N Completed 2006

SERV ICES PROV IDED By BURO HAPPO LD Structural engineering, building services engineering, crowd circulation modelling, contamination consultancy, geotechnical engineering, civil engineering, transport planning, fire engineering and crowd flow consultancy

Ascot is arguably the world’s most famous race venue, with Royal patronage dating back over 300 years. It hosts numerous premier events, with the Royal Ascot meeting heading the bill and attracting around 350,000 visitors over a five day period each year. Renowned for the tradition, pageantry and style of its events, Ascot’s plans to redevelop the Racecourse sought to establish it firmly as ‘the finest racecourse in the world’. Serious crowd movement problems inherent in the old facilities also needed to be resolved in order to deliver a truly world class visitor experience.

Our design encompassed a new grandstand building as well as a new centrally located Parade Ground. To enhance visitor comfort we positioned the grandstand building further north, creating more space for people to move between the two attractions. The centrepiece of our configuration is the grandstand roof, a sweeping 30m by 300m structure, with fan shaped trusses and translucent fabric panels bringing natural light into the galleria whilst providing a memorable signature for the stadium.

The new buildings and facilities incorporate 280 private viewing boxes, public lounges, bars, suites, restaurants, conference and banqueting halls, as well as betting and support facilities. We used sophisticated crowd flow modelling and analysis to optimise both the floor plan within these buildings and people movement routes between the different amenities. This has helped to mitigate the congestion issues associated with the original building and will ensure the smooth and safe running of events in the future.

Our engineers seamlessly integrated several disciplines, including structural, civil, fire and crowd flow engineering to improve all elements of the design and meet a very specific set of objectives. We also used pre-fabrication to complete construction within an extremely tight 20 month window ensuring disruption to the racing calendar was negligible.

A W I N N I N G S O L U T I O N f O R A S C O T

ASCOT RACECOURSE REDEVELOPmENT BERkSHIRE, Uk

Image © Populous