English Premier League (EPL) soccer team West Ham United has started installing the first of 14 brand new floodlight towers to the former Olympic Stadium – the club’s home venue from the 2016/2017 EPL season onward.
The towers, which were also used at the stadium during the 2012 Olympic Games, will retain their triangular design but hang inverted below the stadium’s new roof, to provide enhanced illumination to the field of play. The new floodlight paddles will each house between eight and 41 lamps, many of which are original lamps that shone over the stadium during London 2012.
Each floodlight measures 18m (59ft) in length and weighs 45 tonnes (44 tons). As a result, lifting each floodlight into place takes up to 12 hours in total for each light.
Club ambassador Tony Carr MBE visited the stadium to see the first light going up and was surprised at the project’s scale. “We’ve all seen the light panels as they were during the Olympics, they were such a big part of the iconic look of the stadium, so it’s quite something to see them up close,” he said.
“It’s an exciting moment, just being here you can see how striking the lights will look when they are all in place and switched on, sitting under the new roof. The roof makes such a difference and you can see the halo building, where the turnstiles, catering and other facilities will be, is nearly finished.”
As work began on the floodlight towers, the steel frame for the halo that surrounds the base of the stadium has been completed. This structure will contain 96 turnstiles, 33 catering outlets and close to 1,000 toilets.
Time lapse cameras have captured footage of the work undertaken to complete the halo’s steel frame as well as many other elements of the stadium’s transformation, which can viewed here.
