Following the publication of the summary of responses from supporters to the survey questionnaire on the new stadium, the Lionel Road Steering Group have received the attached comments from the stadium architects, AFL Architects.

These contain quite a bit of information to bring supporters up to date. On 25 June, on behalf of the steering group, we (Mark Chapman, Donald Kerr and Phil Marchant) met the project leaders from AFL Architects together with Brian Burgess, the project manager for Brentford FC (Lionel Road) Ltd, to discuss how the design studies were progressing.

As Brian Burgess has commented: "The key thing is that the Lionel Road site is a triangular shape. As we have always known, it is a tight challenge to fit in all the facilities that are needed to give us a viable project. The good news about this is that the site constraints mean that the shape and configuration of the stadium will be distinctive. There is not sufficient space to build a bland symmetrical single tier bowl! In order to achieve a capacity of 20,000 the current studies are based on a two-tiered stadium, which brings a lot more seats closer to the pitch and should create an enclosed 'cauldron' atmosphere.

Although many supporters would love to see some standing terracing this looks very unlikely as there are no grants available unless new stadiums are all-seated. Clearly we can't afford to close off any possible sources of funding at this stage. Also UEFA and FIFA will not sanction competitive matches unless the stadium is all seated. Again, although this may not affect Brentford games for a few seasons, we obviously want to have the ability to earn revenue from staging games between visiting international teams in future.

Overall there is still a lot of work to be done but the feasibility studies are steadily identifying the key issues and the potential solutions."

The message from the Steering Group is that the architects are stadium experts who know what they are doing and the design studies look very exciting.

You can download the response from AFL from the link below. This file is in pdf format.

http://www.beesunited.org.uk/dmdocuments/afl_response.pdf