Built to celebrate the bicentenary of Marylebone Cricket Club in north London, the Mound Stand consciously echoes the romantic image of the tent by the village cricket green.

Our design radically reinvents the existing 19th century Mound Stand at Lord’s, extending its brick arcade to create an attractive public concourse and renewing the seating tiers. Above, a new steel superstructure supports 27 private boxes, dining rooms and a new upper tier of raked seating and open-air restaurants and bars. This adds 900 new debenture seats to supplement the 4500 public seats on the lower tier.

The superstructure is supported by just six columns to minimise disruption to views, linked by a storey-height plate girder. These same columns continue up to become masts supporting a flamboyant canopy of PVC-coated, polyester fabric redolent of celebratory temporary buildings. The whole structure is held back by tension members anchored to the ground and strapped to the brick piers below to stiffen them.

Finishes are simple and unadorned. The private boxes have folding, frameless glass doors opening onto a raking balcony facing the wicket, with party walls of fair-faced, concrete blockwork. Rear walls onto the corridor are of full height glass blocks. As cricket is played only in the summer, the building is unheated and uninsulated.

Retention of part of the original stand enabled construction to take place in two phases – renovation/extension of lower levels and new build above - to suit the cricket season.