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How the new Liverpool Echo Arena is set to become a landmark of scouse pride and multi-genre, quality entertainment. You might think the location of the Liverpool Echo Arena would be a positive aspect of this eagerly anticipated, almost completed development…down on the water by the Albert Dock, five minutes from town, the Mersey rolling by. But there’s always someone prepared to give a gloomy outlook, isn’t there?
You might think the location of the Liverpool Echo Arena would be a positive aspect of this eagerly anticipated, almost completed development…down on the water by the Albert Dock, five minutes from town, the Mersey rolling by. But there’s always someone prepared to give a gloomy outlook, isn’t there?
 “When I first came here, my colleague’s reaction was, ‘Oh, it’ll be a white elephant – half of your catchment area is fish’,” says general manager Tim Banfield, who arrived on the project from the Birmingham NEC just under two years ago. “And they are just wrong,” he adds.
As they enter the final weeks of a ₤146million (€207m) build that began in October 2005, the team behind the arena and adjoining convention centre, collectively known as Arena and Convention Centre (ACC) Liverpool has an increasing number of answers for any naysayers. Before the venue had even been handed over from construction company to management, early bookings were offering plentiful evidence that demand for these new venues is every bit as high as their backers could have hoped.
“I inherited the initial business plan when I arrived two years ago, and we made some modifications to that, based on our experience,” says Bob Prattey, ACC Liverpool chief executive. “But the level of bookings has exceeded the figures in the business plan, so we have upgraded our income projections.”
No one is inclined to reveal just how pleasant the surprise has been, but the event calendar is beginning to speak for itself. “In 2008, we are expecting over 120 days of activity – actual performance days,” Banfield says. “We’ve got about 12 shows on sale through the box office [as of early November] and a healthy number of pencils that we think will convert.”
With seating for 10,600 concert-goers in the arena, as well as a 1,350-seat auditorium, 18 breakout rooms and up to 7,000m2 of exhibition space in the convention centre, ACC Liverpool amply fills a long-standing gap in the local market. And it does so just in time for the city’s European Capital of Culture year, which officially starts on 12 January with a blockbuster event in the arena.
The confirmation that MTV International will bring the 15th MTV Europe Music Awards to the venue next November provides further vindication of the city’s faith in itself, adding to an arena calendar which already offers CBeebies Live, Westlife, the Number 1 Project Live and The X Factor Live in the first three months after opening.
“[ACC Liverpool] is just what Liverpool needs, and we have needed it for many, many years,” says Lisa Richards, director at Merseysound Productions and Staging, AV supplier for the hall. “On all the large conventions and concerts, we’ve been losing out to Manchester and Birmingham, but this is going to really open Liverpool up to those events.”
Capital of Culture Though the mutual benefits of the tie-in with the Capital of Culture honour are undeniable, they  are also entirely coincidental. ACC Liverpool has been funded by a coalition of five stakeholders comprising the North West Development Agency, Liverpool City Council, the European Union’s Objective 1 redevelopment fund, UK regeneration agency English Partnerships and Liverpool Vision, the independent urban regeneration company behind the ongoing overhaul of Liverpool’s city centre.
“This building would have happened without Capital of Culture, but the Capital of Culture effect has been so dramatic that the two things have become synonymous in terms of the way they have been marketed and sold,” Prattey says. “I don’t think we would have attracted the MTV Awards without it being the Capital of Culture year. We are really hitting the ground running, and it is partly because of the Capital of Culture effect.”
Even to see them in their not-quite-finished state, the Liverpool Echo Arena and its convention centre counterpart are already a worthy addition to the Kings Waterfront. Designed by London-based architects Wilkinson Eyre, this ‘landmark’ venue is easily among the most attractive in its class, and it may even be the outright beauty queen.
“What we haven’t done here is build a crinkly shed,” Prattey confirms. “We have built what we believe – and more importantly, what our clients are now recognising – is a staggeringly attractive building in a fantastic waterfront location.”
The outer concourse areas that run around the arena, known as ‘the podium’, are flooded with natural light and river views, making it possible to tie in with water-borne events with the closure of the road in between.
The arena bowl itself is about as intimate as any 10,600-capacity room could ever be – relatively short in length, with few, if any, bad seats. They are generous seats as well – provided by Audience Systems in the stands and Sandler Seating on the flat floor.
Behind the scenes, flexibility is paramount. The backstage area is large enough to accommodate “anything you can get under a motorway bridge”, says Banfield, while the Sico rolling stage was brought in partly for its ability to move in and out with the minimum fuss.
The fact that the venue comes with a convention centre attached is another unusual plus, and one that appealed particularly to MTV, with its huge production operation. In the arena, the backstage area also has five team-locker rooms, six star dressing rooms and sit-down dining space for 60 in crew catering, as well as Wi-Fi throughout the building, with Wi-Fi cards provided for roaming promoters.
Fighting Force That the whole place has risen out of the ground in just over two years reflects the fact that ACC Liverpool isn’t messing around. “The speed of the build has been phenomenal, and under some pretty difficult circumstances,” says Banfield. “This summer was horrendous in terms of the weather. The glass panels all around the podium – you just can’t lift those in anything higher than a force three, and being next to the river, a force three happens quite a lot.”
Comparisons to The O2 are inevitable, and in this respect, ACC Liverpool is working hard to hold its own. One particular strength is its sheer greenness; a wealth of eco-features include five low-noise wind turbines on site, which will supply around 10% of the venue’s electricity, as well as rainwater tanks on the roof, which will supply 40% of the toilet water, and super-efficient lighting, insulation and air-control.
These features all add up to a building with half the typical CO2 output for a venue of that size, and the savings have been compounded by the decision to run the arena and the convention centre into one another, where initially they were intended as separate buildings. The nature of the development’s funding demanded that a certain amount of attention was paid to ecological concerns, but rather than grudgingly making the bare minimum of effort, the finished product will go above and beyond, according to Prattey.
“It is probably the greenest building in Europe,” he says. “There were various stipulations in our funding that obliged us to address those issues, but we decided we would go further and try to make it a major selling point. We can say to organizers: ‘If you stage your events with us, your carbon footprint will be less than it would be at a competing venue.’ I think we have hit the market at just the right time.”
 The environmental focus of the project has made an impression on suppliers too. “I think the design of it, because it is so green, has given us some challenges,” says Paul Horsman, sales director for the northern arm of ISS UK, the contracted cleaning and waste specialist. “We are hoping to raise the bar within the cleaning industry in terms of things like recycling and using super-concentrated cleaning products, and some of our equipment has got environmentally-friendly batteries as well.”
A policy of local procurement further reduces the level of ACC Liverpool’s indirect carbon emissions: besides obtaining waste and cleaning from ISS UK in Bolton and AV from local supplier Merseysound, food for the arena comes from Heathcotes in Preston; facilities management from Crispin & Borst in Salford; security from Controlled Event Solutions and mains and pipes services from Early Action Group (EAG), both based in Manchester.
As well as handling electrics, EAG is also available to offer exhibition services as required by convention centre clients. “Some will want to take advantage of our knowledge of the venue and the experience we have within it, and they are quite free to appoint us to provide their exhibition services,” says EAG chief executive Steve Barratt.
Bedford-based rigging supplier Star Events has the furthest to come of all the suppliers, and provide what is believed to be an industry-first rigging system, employing Active Roof Technology (ART).
“Every conceivable position in the roof where you might hang things will have electronic weighing machines, effectively coming down to a series of computer monitors, so we can see at a glance what’s happening over the whole venue roof,” says Star Events director Roger Barrett.
Star has designed and installed the rigging system and also holds the three-year in-house rigging contract, with an option to extend for a further two. “We’re very happy about it,” says Barrett. “It’s exciting to be involved in a brand new venue, and because we were involved in it so early on, I really feel like we know it inside-out and backwards.”
Paper Power
Another key partner has been the arena’s namesake, the Liverpool Echo itself. A sponsorship deal with Trinity Mirror gave the group naming rights, and in a city that doesn’t touch The Sun – and a region that revolves very much around the city – the patronage of the local paper and its sister publication in North Wales, the Daily Post, has been a major asset.
Banfield enthuses about the Echo’s support in particular: “Having the Echo on our side means we do get direct contact with the people of Liverpool, because everybody really does read it,” he says.
What’s more, the enthusiasm is mutual. “I remember a few key moments in the Echo office over the years,” says the paper’s assistant editor Andy Edwards. “One of them was when we got the Capital of Culture and everyone was up on their feet cheering, and another was when the plans for the arena were approved.
“The arena coming to fruition and now booking acts has been one of the most positive aspects of the Capital of Culture year,” he adds. “There has been a degree of scepticism about ‘2008’ and what it is actually going to involve, but I would say the arena is probably central to it all at the moment.”
Controlled Event Solutions has even gone to the lengths of specifically training its safety and security staff to present a positive face for Liverpool. “We have a standard requirement of five days training for all our staff, but we have written in extra modules for this particular venue which stresses their ambassadorial role and their extra responsibilities to the city,” says director Mike Halligan.
Within the industry, the arena has received a warm welcome of its own, not least from its new colleagues within the National Arenas Association. “I think it is a marvelous addition to the circuit,” says Nottingham Arena’s Geoff Huckstep, chair of the NAA. “We visited the arena ourselves in September and we were very impressed with what we saw; the relationship between the convention centre and the arena is quite unique and I’m quite sure that once the building is finished it will be a fantastic facility.”
All-Purpose Purpose While superficial comparisons with The O2 are inevitable, the mixture of gigs, family and sporting events will inevitably give the Liverpool Echo Arena a rather different profile. Liverpool may be a great music city, but its population size (even factoring in the rest of the north-west and north Wales) is unlikely to permit the venue to support the same number of concerts as a shed of roughly equivalent size in London.
“It is not like The O2, which probably does 150 nights of music,” says Banfield. “We are not going to do that level of music business, so for the arena to be successful, we have to have a mix of business through the building. We can’t afford to be sat empty, being precious about being a music venue. Having said that, it doesn’t matter how much business I put through the door – if I don’t get concerts, I’m in trouble.”
Other events in 2008 include the World Firefighter Games, week-long rock and pop festival The Winter Pops, plus conventions for the British Chambers of Commerce, the British Association of Dermatologists, and the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference. As Banfield suggests, many of the larger UK promoters are still represented on the 2008 schedule only in pencil, but the number of firm bookings and the generally warm reaction has been enough to persuade him that this won’t be the case for long.
“We are really pleased with the way the promoters have reacted,” Banfield says. “They have really given us a chance and we just have to prove to them that we can really sell the tickets.” This challenge is very much a literal one, given that the arena has elected to set up its own box office, which it plans to build into a multi-purpose ticketing agency for the north-west.
“We wanted to manage customer service through the marketing process and it means we can communicate much more efficiently with our audience,” Banfield says. “On the night, if there are any ticketing issues, it will be much easier for us to find the paper trail, and we also pitch our booking fees lower than the agencies to ensure we are providing value for money.”
The second major aim of the in-house box office is to ensure that the new development generates as many local jobs as possible. “Say we had gone to Ticketmaster, all of their call handling would have gone to Manchester,’ says Banfield. “This way, we have provided five full-time jobs, probably another six part-time jobs, and we have got about another 20 people on our casual books.”
The system has already been tested and passed the initial examination. Tickets for the arena’s WWE RAW WrestleMania Revenge event in April went on sale in October and sold out in two days, with the box office receiving 2,000 calls in the first minute. “The main import of that was to show that our hinterland has enough demand to sell out those events very quickly, which, from a promoter’s point of view is the kind of thing you want to hear,” Prattey says.
Smaller is Beautiful  The Liverpool Echo Arena is significantly smaller than its most immediate rival, Manchester’s MEN Arena, which can scale up to around 21,000. It is smaller than The O2 by a similar margin, but the consensus appears to be that the capacity in each case fits the city.
“This arena is the right size for Liverpool,” Banfield says. “We would have struggled with a 15,000- or 16,000-capacity arena – we would have just ended up half-halling it the entire time.”
Roger Barrett agrees: “The O2 is right for where it is, but it wouldn’t work in Liverpool –it’s too big and too single-purpose,” he says. “I think they’ve got it spot-on in Liverpool, and it’s the right size for the city. Most people in range of the town can walk to the venue. It’s 15 minutes from the train station on the other side of town. There won’t be any problems about getting home after the shows. “
In a busy market, even as the only arena in its particular town, ACC Liverpool will need all its key points of difference – its green emphasis; its promised attention to quality of experience and customer service; its high-quality, purpose-built artist and production areas, and its unusual format as an arena backing directly onto a convention centre.
“When I started out, there were only a handful of arenas in the UK, but then Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield came along, and now The O2,” Banfield says. “The venue business has become a lot more competitive, so when you enter the market, you have to give people that little bit extra. Ultimately, people make comparisons and they want to come to an arena that is clean, well maintained, with quality food and friendly staff, because it’s an expensive night out.” ADAM WOODS
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