Blog July 20

PROJECT Manager Jon Back returns with another blog on the ever-changing face of Home Park.

ANOTHER busy, busy week – and another scorching period of weather that continues to test our overworked grounds team!

As many of you will have seen on our webcams (and apologies for the couple of problems with these recently), the ongoing work at Home Park has continued with some gusto this week.

Significant groundwork has continued across the site and, most strikingly of all, we have seen the delivery and commencement of the installation of our new ticket office and club shop.

These buildings – modern, modular and very well put together – have resembled something like a giant-sized Tetris game going in, but will be finished and landscaped over coming weeks to provide us with (again) the best-ever facilities we have had. On the rear of these buildings, we also have several new toilet blocks for the users of the Mayflower side of the stadium.

With the important, stadium-specific ‘pre-commencement’ conditions of the project now all satisfied to an appropriate standard, it really is all systems go and it is great to see things going up, as well as continuing to come down.

I talked about our new Control Room last time I wrote and the last week has seen a huge amount of work going on to ensure that alarms, CCTV, PA systems, fire telephones, data cables, etc. are all connected and working. As the old Control Room was in the Chisholm Lounge building, we have had to bring a lot of the cabling (miles of it, in fact) all around the ground – via the barn Park End, the Lyndy and the Devonport – to get it to the new Control Room.

There is still a lot of work required to finish this off in time for the new season, but I would like to thank our friends at SecuriGuard and CTI Power Ltd (previously C&D electrical), amongst many others, for everything they have done and continue to do – they have really pulled the stops out and prioritised this crucial bit of work for us. Thanks guys – great work from great fans.

Back to the shop: we will see the first supporters in through the doors in around eight weeks’ time. Whilst the new ticket office will face directly on to the front, the double doors in the middle of the old art deco façade will provide your main entrance into the new shop.

Incidentally, we have been looking for the old ‘Plymouth Argyle’ wrought iron sign that used to adorn the front of the façade prior to a makeover several years ago – if anyone knows where it is, please give me a shout! I think it would look really quite special to have the original lettering back on what must now be one of the oldest parts of Home Park.

The ticket office will have a number of windows, including one at an appropriate height for people using wheelchairs, and on pacing the shop floor out, although the space is going to be a bit wider one way but narrower the other, we will have roughly the same space available as we do in our current superstore – and, for those of you that travel to away matches, you will know that ours is already one of the biggest club shops across the EFL!

Whilst we are on the subject of tickets, our reduced capacity will test us when we are at the top of the league later this year – if you want to guarantee yourself a seat for our promotion push you should grab yourself a season-ticket. We have limited the amount we are going to sell this year and numbers left to purchase are very limited…

So, onwards and upwards – and, for some of the remaining obsolete buildings, downwards, too.

Keep it Green.

JB