Wimbledon’s No.1 Court retractable roof project at The All England Lawn Tennis Club has successfully completed its first year of a three-year project.
SCX Special Projects, the company tasked with the development work, was awarded the contract following its venture of designing, manufacturing and installing a similar retractable roof over Wimbledon’s Centre Court in 2009.
The folding roof over the 11,500-capacity No.1 Court is part of major renovation work that will vastly increase the seating capacity and transform the arena into an all-weather grass-court.
The project is scheduled to be fully complete in time for the 2019 Championship, although it will still be in use for the next two years’ tournaments.
The new roof has already used more than 3,500 tonnes of steel, the equivalent of 295 Airbus aeroplanes. SCX Special Projects has devised a concertina design, stretched between 11 steel trusses with two main sections that meet in the middle.
The roof will be able to be deployed and retracted in around eight minutes.
SCX Group managing director Simon Eastwood said: “We are very proud to have built the original retractable roof on Centre Court, and subsequently to have been chosen by the AELTC to work on No.1 Court.
“It’s testament to the successful engineering solutions and skills we used first time around that we were in a position to embark on the second project. SCX is now firmly one of the leading builders of kinetic architecture in the UK.”
Image: Michael Frey
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