Leicester City Football Club Training Ground

Project Overview

Throughout 2019/20, Siniat played a significant role in supporting the construction of one of the most modern, state-of-the-art training facilities in Europe. Built from the ground up on the site of a former golf course, Leicester City’s new training ground was designed to be an iconic landmark building, providing a platform for success, growth and development for the next generation of sportspeople.

To support the development of the site Siniat worked with main contractor, McLaren, and subcontractor, RDK, to provide a full range of Siniat systems from internal partitions to external sheathing, which ensured that the structure met all performance requirements for fire, weather proofing, air tightness, acoustics, moisture and impact. A number of Siniat’s plasterboard products were used across various areas of the site, including in 30 bedrooms, dining facilities, an indoor training area, multi-use training and ancillary buildings, and the security lodge building.

While the project faced challenging weather conditions and restrictions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, Siniat was able to work seamlessly with all key partners to ensure a smooth process, from design through to completion, providing technical support at every stage.

Design and specification:

Siniat’s specification team engaged at an early stage and were able to provide a fully compliant, cost-effective system that met all performance requirements. With input and advice from Siniat’s technical team. The original mixed dry-lining specification was changed to a full Siniat system, which included a number of important plasterboard products, including its LaDura board.

LaDura is a high impact strength board that provides extended life cycle in high traffic areas, making it perfect for the training ground’s requirements. With excellent fire, sound, impact and moisture performance, LaDura was specified for the main training pitch on this scheme.

The scheme also utilised Siniat’s Weather Defence – a revolutionary sheathing board product, faced with water repellent material for superior weather protection. This provided a faster way to weather tight the building compared to traditional sheathing board products, as well as being A1 non-combustible. With dimensionally stable, reliable airtightness, as well as being water, weather and mould resistant, Weather Defence provides high-impact durability and superior weather protection.

Installation

Prior to commencement onsite, and throughout the build process, Siniat’s technical team provided ongoing expertise and advice – not only so that the structure met the required performance criteria, but also to ensure that relevant parties were fully confident on installing it in a compliant way. This support ranged from regular technical meetings with the architect and site team, online and face to face meetings and bespoke onsite detailing working closely with the specialist sub-contractor. Through conducting this level of support in addition to onsite compliance checks, Siniat was also able to de-risk the project by highlighting and resolving any areas of concern before they could become problematic..

Final results

Siniat’s full system was able to meet all of the desired performance criteria and provide an effective, durable, and fully compliant solution for the high profile, 185-acre scheme.

The unrelenting progress of this project from day one was testament to McLaren and Siniat’s continued ethos of building successful partnerships. The experience that both parties have in working on challenging projects meant that they could provide the expertise and support required to tackle any potential challenges or delivery difficulties.

In providing technical support and advice from conceptualisation to completion, Leicester City was able to rest assured that Siniat’s system would meet the demands of the state-of-the-art facility for generations to come.