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‘The Point’ Lancashire County Cricket Club’s new 1000 seat hospitality and banqueting venue will be officially opened by Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff on Sunday 27th June at the One Day International between England and Australia.
The building is the first phase of a larger masterplan which seeks to transform the ground and win back Ashes cricket for fans in the North West of England.
The design has been developed to enable the Club to provide highly flexible and technically advanced conference and banqueting facilities, capable of catering for groups of up to 1000 people at a single sitting - a feature unique in the City. The requirement for space and height has driven the design, where the large well proportioned banqueting space hovers above a seating terrace below, and benefits from a spectacular full height glazed wall, giving uninterrupted views to the pitch, Manchester and the Pennines beyond.
Particular emphasis has also been given to sustainability. The building has a range of sustainable features including rainwater harvesting, solar collectors, and a state of the art low energy lighting system, which contribute to the building’s outstanding environmental performance and enable it to achieve a Gold Rating in the Green Business Tourism scheme.
The building has been constructed to a very tight budget. Accordingly the aesthetic has been developed out of the building’s engineering and technical requirements, the need to create a vast 7.5m high column free internal space, and developing a place specific to the architectural narrative, which relates to the ground’s rugged post-industrial context and the changing face of 21st century cricket, rather than an anachronistic recreation of an imagined Edwardian idyll of ‘cricket on the village green’.
The Phase II development extends the scale and aesthetic language to the rest of the ground and will, when complete, provide a unique and spectacular home for cricket in the North West of England.