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There is a long history of failed or mothballed projects to develop St James’ Park, Newcastle United’s cathedral on the hill.

From moving to Gosforth in the sixties to the Tyneside ‘San Siro’ in Leazes Park via a plan to position the club’s ground next to the River Tyne, there have been plenty of schemes to take St James’ Park to the next level.

But a radical plan drawn up for potential investors in the last five years – and recently seen by ChronicleLive in the wake of Tottenham’s new ground opening – has a different suggestion for SJP. The idea, controversially, would be to turn the pitch 90 degrees to add 17,000 to the capacity.

It is the brainchild of John Henry, a design manager with architectural, masterplanning, construction and engineering experience on some big projects. He thinks a Tottenham-style development of the ground would be feasible – and felt that long before Spurs made their changes.

“The ground as it is is fine,” he said.

“But for the club it needs to be bigger but the choice is: Do you move? To me that would be the worst thing ever. You can’t move the spirit of a place.

“So how do you make it work? The secret is to turn it 90 degrees. It just needs a visionary to look at it and it think ‘We could do something here’. There was some way of starting the work and not doing it all in one shot.

“It’d be great to stir something up because sometimes it is about the vision.”

The plans: St James' Park in its current form

(Image: John Henry)

And as envisaged with the pitch turned 90 degrees

(Image: John Henry)

Henry is an associate of Neil Mitchell, the well-connected Dubai-based former head of the Newcastle United Supporters Trust and occasional columnist for ChronicleLive, and that is how the issue of the problem with St James’ Park expansion came to his attention.

At the time there was serious interest in buying the club in the Middle East and he was asked to look at ways St James’ Park could be developed. Henry’s idea was to turn the ground around 90 degrees, which would enable development on either side of the ground.

“He said one of the big difficulties was the capacity of the stadium,” he said.

“For a frontline team you needed a certain size capacity and I had been involved with a couple of other stadiums across the world and one of the things that bothers me is that TV is reducing the number of people going to games.

“But I think it’s transitory because watching sport live is a better experience than watching it on TV. I think what will happen eventually is that it will revert back to people paying to watch matches and then the teams with the biggest grounds are going to benefit from it. 70,000 at Newcastle United does not seem like a push.

“But the problem is: How do you finance stuff like that? Recently you’d find an owner who would pay for the rebuilding of the stadium – it’s worked very well at Man City. But realistically it’s about how you make it work as an economic thing.

“One of the advantages you have at SJP is you’re right beside the park. The first thing I was looking at was how you accommodate 70,000 and in doing that you discover that the trick is to turn the stadium. It’s something that came up at Landsdowne Road with the rugby stadium. A lot of people said: ‘Is this the end of the world?’ And then suddenly it becomes the right thing to do. I looked at that and then suddenly it gives you the ability to get a long facade facing the park and a short facade on the difficult side with the terrace opposite that listed building and then the short side on the road where it’s twisting round.

“You look at putting a hotel on one side and lots of residential on the stands on the right hand side. That actually generates a lot of income to pay for the works and makes it more feasible.

“At that time Neil was saying there was someone out here looking to take over the club and this sort of thing would have made it more feasible. It didn’t happen, I moved from Dubai to Bahrain and the whole thing went quiet.”

It’s understood that the plans were shared with Amanda Staveley during the long-running takeover saga that moved from 2017 into 2018 and it was fit into her idea of making United more commercially viable. That takeover bid, however, did not progress.

The plans have been mothballed of late but Henry talked enthusiastically about it during a half hour chat with him in Bahrain, where he is working on a hotel project.

Henry’s background is in architecture and urban design and he has 35 years in the industry. He worked in the Canary Wharf development before that became the epicentre of London’s financial district and for Yorkshire Forward on a “masterplan” for Sheffield and urban regeneration of Wakefield.

As part of that, he was tasked with a Rugby League stadium project. “One of the things we ended up doing was looking at amalgamating Castleford Tigers and Featherstone’s grounds. The secret was both of them suffered from bad stadiums and there was an opportunity to build a new stadium in Castleford and link others things to it,” he said.

That project proved controversial but he saw similarities in the St James’ Park issue. Rather than a problem, though, it’s unique position delivered some opportunities.

It is an early stage idea, but several weeks of work went into the initial plans he has shared with ChronicleLive. “There’s two thirds of the ground would still be the same ground,” he explains.

“The stands would not be that much higher. The thing about it is you want to get most of the people on the sides. I’ve drawn the existing stadium – which is the blue pieces, which stay the way they are – so behind the goal and listed building end would be the same.

“So it’s not as heavily layered as it looks. What I also did was look at other stadiums and the depth of seating would be very similar to Old Trafford. If you think about that, it’s not that bad a stadium in terms of views and the density of seats. I think this ground would be reasonably feasible in terms of spectactor experience.

“With stacking underneath it with commercial property – which makes it possible, because it’s an undertaking now with stadiums. The trick would be to have it as a hard-nosed developer, not a football fan, because that’s the nature of these kind of projects.”

His enthusiasm reawakened for the grand plan, Henry will draw up more detailed sketches and plans in the coming weeks. But he acknowledges his intention in going public – at our request – is, perhaps, to stir a bit of interest in how the club should look to develop it’s main asset.

“It really could be done. With these things, it’s usually just someone coming along and actually thinking about what can be done,” he said.