TOP TEAM HAMPDEN PARK
When it opened, Hampden Park was the world’s largest stadium. In 1937 a total of 149,415 people packed into the venue to see Scotland play England in a football international. Since then it has undergone two redevelopments, but none as ambitious as the one it will see prior to the Glasgow 2014 Games. The entire playing surface will be raised by 1.9 metres – to a level above the first eight rows of seats – as part of converting the stadium from a football venue into an international-standard track and field facility. A warm-up track and jump areas
will be created next to the stadium at Lesser Hampden, with secure, direct access to the main stadium. Further im- provements will be carried out at both Hampden and Lesser Hampden, leaving a sporting legacy after the Games.
SUZANNE McCORMACK
DEVELOPMENT MANAGER, HAMPDEN PARK
What’s your background? I started as an architectural draftsperson and went on to work for a practice in Glasgow which specialised in stadium de- sign. The first football stadium I worked on was Hull KC. After a stint in Australia, I returned to the UK and worked on the construction of the London 2012 velo- drome, where I got the taste for working on a large sports event. The timing of it all then worked out
fantastically – soon after we completed the velodrome I took up a position with the Commonwealth Games and re- turned to Glasgow.
What is your day to day role? My primary role is to make sure the conversion of Hampden Park from football to athletics and back to football goes to plan. To do that involves the management of various consultants and expertise to make sure all that information gets co-ordinated and delivered to the appointed architects, project managers and structural engineers – and also to co- ordinate it all back to the stakeholders.
We don’t own the stadium so we need to feed that back to Hampden Park and Queens Park Football Club to ensure their asset is looked after. So it’s an end to end solution.
What are your biggest challenges? Bringing all the small bits together and making sure all aspects of the projects are co-e could install the greatest track in the world but if we don’t have the right timing and scoring equipment then we can’t hold an event. Challenge wise we’ve also had some
major deadlines to hit – appointing con- sultants and getting the right architects on board. We only recently got on site (the heavy equipment moved in to the stadium in late November), so probably the biggest challenges lay ahead – which include the delivery of the track. The last game to be played at Hampden was a Queens Park game on 23 November so we had to wait until that was played to get our team in. All our preparatory work has been
designed so that we hit the ground run- ning. All of the designs were ready and the materials procured so that when we got in, everything was ready to be car- ried in and get started.
How do you work together with the organising committee? We have weekly project team meetings.
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The heavy machinery moved into the stadium in November to start work
Issue 4 2013 © cybertrek 2013
Internally I work as part of the develop- ment team so we meet on a weekly basis to make sure we’re all doing the same thing from a development point of view. We then have a weekly project team
meeting with all who are involved on the Hampden project. This includes the venue operating and the technology teams. We also need to keep our part- ners and stakeholders informed so we have regular steering group meetings with the Scottish government, Glasgow City Council, Glasgow Life and Queens Park Football Club. Projects like this are more about people than anything else.
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