Inside the stadium

The bowl holds just over 4,000 seats in 20 rows, a field that is either a pitch or a stage, and a crowd that changes with the day. You enter it from one of four tunnels on the concourse and come out at the foot of the stands.

The first post covered the gate, the forecourt and the concourse. This one starts at the tunnel mouth.

The tunnels and the stands

The four tunnels run under the upper rows at the compass points. Each is 14 feet wide, lined in precast concrete and lit by three strip lights. The sign over the field end names the seats above you: sections 101 to 105, 106 to 110, 111 to 115 and 116 to 120. The place name on screen reads “Extant 2000 Stadium, the stands” while you are in one, and “the field” once you step out.

The stands themselves are a wall to you. You cannot climb them. The tunnels are the only openings, so you look up at the rows from the floor.

The rows rise 1.5 feet each. Each row is 1.6 to 1.75 feet deep, which makes a rake of about 41 degrees. That is the steep end of a real upper tier. A rise of 2.1 feet a row, at 51 degrees, read as a wall of seats, so the rows were brought down to 1.5. The first row stands 3 feet above the field and the twentieth stands 31.5 feet above it.

On a desktop browser the tiers are precast concrete on raker beams and columns. Aisle stairs with handrails run up between the seat blocks, with a nosing on every step. Railings run round the top walkway and down the sides of each tunnel. The seats are moulded shells with a brushed aluminium number plate and a dark bracket, none in the aisles. They are navy. Every sixth sector of the 24 round the bowl is orange, and the top two rows are grey. In front of row one runs a navy ad board with an orange stripe.

Two screens hang under the roof’s inner edge. The big screen, 44 by 22 feet, is at the east end. It shows the same face as the video board outside. The scoreboard, 34 by 14 feet, is at the west end and shows the same lines in amber LED. At a match the scoreboard shows the two team names, HOME and AWAY, with the board’s line beneath. It does not keep a score.

The field and the stage

Round the field runs a rubber running track, and inside it the grass. The field is set by the day. On Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday it is a stage. On the other days it is a pitch.

The pitch is 96 feet long and 60 wide, with the lines painted into the grass texture, which the floodlights light after dark. There is a halfway line and a centre circle. Each end has two boxes and a goal, 12 feet wide and 8 feet high, with a net. Corner flags stand at the four corners. The goal posts are solid.

Three kinds of event use the pitch:

• A match on Sunday from 13:00 to 17:00 puts 22 players and a referee on the grass. The ball wanders across the pitch and now and then lifts off for a long ball. 1,300 people sit in the stands, spread all round the bowl, and on a desktop a Mexican wave goes round them.
• Practice on Monday and Wednesday, 10:00 to 14:00, is six players: four jogging a loop and two passing a ball. Six people watch from the seats.
• On an ordinary day the pitch is empty. The goals are up, the lines are down and you can walk it.

When the field is a stage, it sits at the back of the field, away from the gate. The stage is 60 feet wide and 20 deep, with a deck 6 feet high. Over it a lattice truss stands 36 feet tall. Fourteen lamps hang along the truss front, and ten floor cans sit along the stage lip. A speaker stack 18 feet high stands at each end, with hung arrays above. A big screen, 40 by 22 feet, hangs behind the band. A front-of-house desk sits under a tent in the crowd.

The stage has three uses. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 10:00 to 14:00 it holds a sound check, with a band of three on the stage, a technician at the desk and no crowd in the seats. On Friday and Saturday from 19:00 to 23:00 it holds a concert. The stands fill with 1,600 people, everywhere except behind the stage, and 420 more stand on the floor in front of it.

During a concert the truss beams sweep and change colour. After dark, which is when the sky light drops under 0.35, lasers fan out over the crowd and smoke rolls off the stage front.

FlameNet Radio

A concert night plays a real station. The server picks it. It plays one music station for a set of 20 to 30 minutes, then another that was not among the last ten, and skips a station that fails at once. Everyone in the bowl hears the same one. No visitor can change it.

Your browser asks the server what is on every 15 seconds while you are near the stadium, and again at the edges of a set. Nothing plays before your first click or key press, and the volume button and the M key apply as they do everywhere else.

The music drives the show. The bass sets how bright the truss beams are. The mid frequencies drive the floor lights. A beat detector on the bass makes the crowd jump, and every third person raises their arms and sways. If the page cannot read the audio, the show falls back to a steady 120 beats a minute. While the radio runs, the big screen over the stage shows the station’s name, its genre and the title the station says is playing, instead of a band’s name.

A lectern stands on the field beside the stage, on the east side, with a lit face toward the crowd and the words RADIO and PRESS E. Walk up and press E. A board opens, titled Now on stage, with:

• the station and its genre
• what the station says is playing
• the time left in the set
• the next station, in the last minute of the set

The board is read only. Nothing on it changes the station, and the server has no route that would.

Outside a concert night the radio plays for whoever is inside the bowl, at 45 percent of the concert level, under whatever else the calendar has on. You can have a match going and still hear the station. Standing outside the wall, you hear none of it. On a concert night the music carries down the street at up to 35 percent. If the server’s radio is off, the board says so and the calendar’s own bands play.

Spectators sit in the same seats every visit. Those within 45 feet of you are swapped for the street’s rigged figures, seated in their seats. Further out they are simpler figures.

To leave, walk up a tunnel and out through Gate A, or press B for the Go panel from anywhere in the bowl.