Design features 12 towering chimney structures intended as an homage to the city’s industrial past
Heatherwick Studio has unveiled plans for a new 62,000-seat stadium for Birmingham City Football Club featuring a ring of towering chimney-like structures.
The new ground at Bordesley Green has been designed in collaboration with US stadium specialist Manica and film director Steven Knight, the lead writer on the next James Bond film.
More than double the size of the club’s current 29,000-seat home ground at St Andrew’s, it would be the centrepiece of a proposed ‘sports quarter’ on the eastern side of the city which is envisaged to contain food markets, restaurants, cafes and children’s play areas.
The brick-faced chimneys are intended as an homage to the city’s industrial past and the site’s longstanding history of brick manufacturing.
They would serve multiple purposes including supporting the roof structure, housing stairwells and lifts, ventilation and channeling sound from the stadium bowl upwards to prevent noise pollution.
One of the chimneys would also house a lift to transport visitors to Birmingham’s highest bar, with views over the city and an immersive exhibition experience telling stories of the city’s past.
Heatherwick Studio founder Thomas Heatherwick said: “Too often, stadiums feel like spaceships that could have landed anywhere, sterilising the surrounding area. Ours grows from Birmingham itself — from its brickworks, its history of a thousand trades, and the craft at the core of its culture.”
“It’s also a wholehearted place for the community. The stadium will truly come alive where it meets the ground; a place for play, gathering, and everyday life. Our goal is to capture the spirit of the city and play it back to Birmingham.”
The stadium bowl, designed by Manica, has also been designed to maximise the intensity of matchday moments with the steeply stacked stands pulled as close as possible to the pitch to create a “360-degree wall of fans”.
The club’s American owners Knighthead want the stadium to be completed in less than five years, in time for the 2030/31 football season. A public engagement on the plans is scheduled to start next year.
The scheme’s accelerated timeline comes a year and a half after Knighthead purchased a 48-acre former go-karting park in Bordesley for the new stadium and announced plans to move the club to the new location by August 2029.
Club chairman admitted at the time that the timescale was “lunacy”, adding: “I’m going to keep saying it, even if it makes people sweat. A lot of it is outside of our control, but that is the goal.”
Responding to the designs of the new stadium, which were unveiled at an event in Digbeth yesterday to mark the club’s 150th anniversary, Wagner said the plans “reflect our ambition to compete at the highest level”.
He added: “More than that, the iconic design is a statement of intent for the City of Birmingham and the West Midlands, testament to a region that is on the rise.
“The stadium draws upon the proud heritage of the West Midlands – a heritage of industry, ingenuity and growth. I believe those same qualities can create a new era of success on and off the field and prosperity for local communities that have been starved of opportunities for too long”.
Wagner has previously estimated the scheme and its wider mixed-use campus will cost between £2bn and £3bn, with the project estimated to contribute £760 million annually to Birmingham’s economy by 2035.
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