Hello, Bramley-Moore Dock

One of the perks of my old job was the view. Every day, I’d ride to the 13th floor and, walking between the lift doors and my riverside desk, gaze through the clear walls of panelled glass.

Most days, beyond the swooping seagulls and perching pigeons, I could see all the way across to the Wirral. Often, tugboats, ferries and even cruise ships would sail past the docks. Once, I watched a storm roll in off the Irish Sea, an immense dark mass creeping down the Mersey on spindly electric fingers. Somehow, none of that seemed as portentous as what was rising from Bramley-Moore Dock.

Fast forward to 2025. I now write for you fine people, and in August, Everton’s new stadium (so far, simply called “Everton Stadium”) will become the club’s full-time home. Fans are understandably excited; Liverpool’s other residents decidedly less so, for reasons we’ll come to learn. To find out whether this enormous structure — the eighth-largest football stadium in the country — will benefit the city beyond simple bragging rights, I attended the second test event alongside 25,000 other fans. But before we get to all that, a bit of history. 

Everton’s house move was a long time coming. In 1990, the Taylor Report cut Goodison Park’s once-near-80,000 capacity in half. Six years later, then-chairman Peter Johnson mentioned the possibility of moving. But it wasn’t until 2021 that ground was finally broken. For three and a half years, my colleagues  — one even armed with a tripod-mounted telescope to scrutinise every metal beam  — and I watched a jumble of cranes become a circular frame of massive poles, then a curved basket of girders and joists.

I still didn’t believe it would happen. Maybe it was the soul-pulping admin job or the usually slate-grey skies above Liverpool Bay that sapped me of hope. But “luxury” flats and student accommodation aside, this is seldom a city where things  — big, potentially future-defining things  — get built.

Or maybe I’ve just been an Everton fan for too long. (Or not long enough  — I was born a year after our last league title win.) Oh, we’ve had our downs: I’ve watched the Toffees get thumped 3-0 at home by Tranmere Rovers in the FA Cup and get screwed by Pierluigi Collina in a Champions League qualifier. But the false dawns  — optimistic new owners later chased out of town like lepers, fresh-faced young managers aging decades in a matter of months, world-class players moved on for less than their full worth  — are even worse. As for arenas, this city is haunted by the club’s aborted futures, from the King’s Dock to the Kirkby Project. As Everton narrowly escaped relegation on the pitch and suffered FA sanctions off it, the rising stadium became an albatross among the seagulls in my peripheral vision. For three and a half years, I came into work expecting to see that Everton Stadium had collapsed into the Mersey.

But it didn’t. And on days when we had nothing better to do, my mate and I would take a lunchtime stroll down Waterloo Road for a closer look. What we found fascinated me. The area was nothing like Everton’s current home in Walton  — for all its problems and post-industrial decline, a vibrant community of shops, parks, cafes, pubs, and terraced houses. Vauxhall  — where unemployment once hit 36%  — felt much more like a relic of heavy industry, a dockland drained of its mercantile lifeblood and never subject to a much-needed transfusion. Until now.

Dan Meis designed the new Bramley-Moore football ground. His decades of experience building innovative, unique stadiums include Los Angeles’ multi-purpose Staples Center, the home of the LA Lakers that has also hosted concerts by Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, and the transformable Saitama Super Arena in Japan, favoured by boxing, MMA, and pro-wrestling events. Everton Stadium is bigger than both: a 52,888-seater behemoth.

Unlike the Staples or the Saitama, Merseyside’s new arena has been designed primarily for Premier League matches. This is fitting, considering Goodison Park was England’s first purpose-built football ground in 1892. It’s also a welcome salve to Evertonian fears that they could end up like their West Ham counterparts: consigned to a massive, versatile, but ultimately soulless modern bowl, forever nostalgic for a demolished ancestral home that had been built with fans and a football pitch in mind.

That said, the club have already announced non-football events: this autumn, the new ground will host the second test match in rugby league’s Ashes between England and Australia, the first such series in 22 years. (That has not been met with unalloyed approval, with Everton fans worried the rough-and-tumble nature of rugby league may leave their club’s new pitch in a less-than pristine state.)

Considering its stated purpose, what about non-sports occasions? “While the stadium is first and foremost a football stadium,” the club says, “there will be an opportunity to host other events”, with outdoor concerts and large conferences mentioned on the ground’s official website. “For concerts, we’ll be able to host between 45,000 and 48,000 fans,” Suzie Parker‑Myers, Everton’s head of events, has previously said. And while that revenue can go towards signing footballers to new contracts, it may also profit the city as a whole.

With Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel all due to make appearances, Liverpool FC’s Anfield stadium is getting ready for a big summer. Over the last five years, concerts at Anfield by just seven performers  — including Taylor Swift  — have already given the city’s economy a £31 million boost. And yet, in a record-breaking 2024 for the UK’s live music industry, Liverpool was the loser, hosting 8% fewer events than in 2023. Compare that with Newcastle, which experienced a 155% increase on the previous year, while Sheffield (+57%) and Leeds (+15%) also rode the country’s 20-year-high musical wave. Although the North West region had the most venue closures in the UK last year (19), even Manchester managed to put on 12% more gigs than in 2023.

Liverpool has often found itself left out of musicians’ tour schedules because of its coastal position (all railways terminate at Lime Street, whereas Manchester provides access to Leeds, Sheffield, and Newcastle) and lack of major arenas. (Manchester’s AO Arena  — also, incidentally, designed by Meis  — is twice the 11,000-person capacity of Liverpool’s M&S.) If Everton’s new stadium could just match Anfield’s five-year concert schedule, red and blue residents could both begin to benefit. As Parker-Myers told IQ magazine last month, the idea is to complement, not compete with, Anfield.

The first test event at Everton Stadium, an under-18s match with Wigan Athletic with 10,000 fans in attendance on 17th February, was broadly considered a success. But I would now be one of 25,000. Anxieties remained.

Transport issues have troubled fans and locals alike. Sandhills is now the closest railway station to Everton’s home, but anyone expecting, say, an extra platform to meet demand has been disappointed thus far. Instead, some temporary railings across an asphalted space was excitedly proclaimed a “fan zone” by the city region’s mayor. Meanwhile, arguments over parking restrictions around the stadium have entangled the council, businesses and residents for months, with a petition opposing an “Experimental Traffic Regulation Order” collecting more than 7,000 signatures.

As I wrote in January, there’s nothing much wrong with Goodison Park. If Everton Stadium does become the city’s albatross, it’ll feel like a defeat far more embarrassing than any single football match: at least that ends after 90 minutes. The construction I witnessed from my desk has already been blamed for the city’s famed waterfront losing its UNESCO world heritage status. (Something of a double-edged sword, it must be said.)

So it’s with no small trepidation that I travel to Everton’s second test event: an under-21s game against Bolton Wanderers. Feeling no particular desire to trial mayor Rotheram’s fan zone, I walk from the city centre, taking the time to slalom up and down the streets linking Regent Road with Great Howard Street. I see broken-down Hackneys cannibalised for parts and pigeons roosting in half-collapsed roofs, weeds springing from red-brick warehouses and windows smashed or boarded up.

But although this area is very different from bustling, lively Walton, it’s not dead. The Eldonian Village community has endured long enough to see the Ten Streets regeneration and the nearby Blackstock Market come into being. By night, the North Docks have become de rigueur for alternative music venues.

One of these, Meraki, has attempted to geg in on the test event, branding its outdoor area an “Everton beer garden”  — unsuccessfully, it has to be said, since I don’t see a single blue shirt there. And this isolated drinking establishment only seems to prove a general rule: amenities that match-going fans have come to expect are few and far between. By the time I reach the Bramley Moore, the only real pub within walking distance of the new stadium, its patrons are so numerous they spill out onto Regent Road in their plastic-cup-carrying droves.

Getting into the vast plaza in the stadium’s shadow is a breeze. While I can’t say I’m a fan of the irregular brick strips that form the building’s façade, there’s lots to admire from the outside. The dockside railings, for instance, are deliberately redolent of the criss-crossing girders distinctive in Archibald Leitch’s Goodison design. When the sun shines, the shadow of Everton’s old home is cast upon fresh concrete. On the opposite side, perhaps to contrast the versatility of this outdoor space with the hemmed-in restrictions of Goodison, a band plays on a large sound stage. With a 17,000 capacity, it’s easy to imagine this plaza hosting a music festival or other large outdoor event without even troubling the stadium itself. 

But it's the interior that really matters. Once again, my passage through an e-ticket-enabled turnstile is seamless. Somehow, even the still-bare concrete stairwells are haunted by expectation. Resisting the allure of doughnuts bearing the club’s crest and foot-long hotdogs smothered in blue (yes, blue) ketchup, I decide to find my seat. 

Upon stepping out into the arena for the first time, awe is an appropriate response. But it’s only by climbing to the very top of the South Stand that Meis’ architectural achievement becomes clear. This impossibly steep terrace — at a 35-degree gradient, the sharpest permissible under UK law — was allegedly inspired by the “Gelbe Wand” effect of Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion, where opposition players are met with an implacable tidal wave of yellow-clad home supporters bearing down on them. Whether 52,000 Evertonians can duplicate that atmosphere remains to be seen, but I discovered that even in this immense structure’s bloodiest of nosebleed seats, the pitch somehow feels intimately close. A far cry from the obstructed views up in Goodison’s “gods”.

The match itself didn’t really matter. Everton’s youth side were 1-0 up when the scheduled evacuation began, a necessity if the stadium is to pass its safety certificates before the next Premier League season. By that point, I was making my way across the bridge by Stanley Dock, which would become another site of controversy when traffic stewards stopped fans from crossing, claiming the bascule couldn’t take the weight.   

That pedestrian impasse may well result in more bootless cries to Town or City Hall. Or to Peel Waters, now responsible for developing so much of Liverpool’s docklands. But while I’m hesitant to project my own pessimistic tendency onto others, I do sometimes suspect this fan base  — and perhaps the city region as a whole  — of tending to see a glass half empty. Over the course of the day, I spoke to fans incredulous about travel by car, rail, and even the walking distance between the ground and the city centre. (A surely not impassable 20-minute stroll.) Obviously, elderly or disabled fans reliant on trains will have different needs and expectations. But Great Howard Street is a walk I’m used to. (And  — as a scribbler enamoured of liminal spaces or post-industrial hinterlands  — one I enjoy.) If only to offer an alternative voice among the downbeat clamour, Everton Stadium is  — for me, at least  — much more accessible than Goodison, where I was at the mercy of four buses.

Furthermore, and with all respect due to Ten Streets, the Blackstock, and the Titanic Hotel, Everton Stadium is the most significant development in the north Liverpool dockland in a century. Considered as a potential music or events venue, it dwarfs the M&S Arena to its south. It may well be the largest new structure built since the city’s imperial heyday. If the loss of Goodison Park does prove to be economically damaging to Walton and Kirkdale, the potential benefit of Everton Stadium to its surrounding area should be inversely proportionate. Unlike Manchester United’s proposed New Trafford, it hasn’t cost £2 billion, and it doesn’t look like a portal into some ridiculous corporate hellscape. Unlike London Stadium, it hasn’t compromised the connection between live fans and the players they cheer on nor with the character of the surrounding area. (Perhaps conscious of UNESCO scapegoating, Everton says it spent £55 million on preserving, restoring and refitting heritage assets.) In an age where “managed decline” is never far from people’s conscious thoughts, Everton Football Club has chosen to dream big on Bramley-Moore Dock. Once the details are ironed out, maybe Liverpudlians can, too.