KSS’s Leicester City stadium expansion set for approval

Leicester City Council is set to approve KSS’s major development at Leicester City Football Club’s King Power StadiumAn application to increase the stadium’s capacity and build a 20-storey residential building has been recommended for approval at Leicester City Council’s planning and development committee on Wednesday (14 September).The hybrid application includes detailed plans to add 8,000 seats to the stadium as well as outline plans for the residential building, a club shop, arena, hotel, office space, multistorey car park and food outlets.The King Power Stadium was designed by Holmes Miller and completed in 2002 on a 9ha site south-west of Leicester’s city centre.Its current capacity is 32,000 but this would increase to 40,000 under the plans, with an upper tier added above the eastern stand and partially wrapped around the north and south stands.The additional tier would be built on land that is currently a concourse and would be covered with a grid structure with inflated triangular ETFE pillows. The new stand would be 152m long, 30m wide and 47m tall, also including hospitality suites, catering facilities, a sensory room and a first aid room.Outline plans for development around the stadium include a 220-room hotel and business centre, a 20-storey residential building with up to 234 homes of various tenures, a multistorey car park with 525 spaces, and a 6,000-capacity arena to be used for conferences, exhibitions and events.Other outline elements include a two-storey shop for club merchandise, a small office building next to the River Soar, and a new access road, cycle path and public realm.Leicester City Council planners said the expansion would ‘potentially allow the club to remain competitive within the Premier League and European club competitions’ and would also ‘enable increased capacity for concerts and non-sporting events, enhancing the profile of the city’.They acknowledged that ‘the townscape impacts on sensitive areas are not insignificant, owing to the height and bulk of the buildings’ but said these issues could be addressed through refinement of form and material and the reserved matters stage.They concluded that the ‘extensive range of positive public benefit impacts, especially the provision of new dwellings, new employment, new investment and spending in the area, and the opportunity to secure enhanced leisure provision for residents of the city, [would] provide significant public benefits, which cumulatively outweigh the harm’.