Fifteen days before the first rugby at the rebuilt St Helen’s, the new floodlights are lying on the pitch. Photographs taken at the ground on Tuesday by Paul Rogers show a galvanised column laid flat across the artificial surface, with fitters bolting the LED lamp heads to its crossarm before the whole thing is winched upright.
Behind it, one of the old lattice pylons is still standing. The remains of another lie in sections by the pavilion.
The tallest of them, long said to be the tallest sports floodlight in Europe at 150ft, came down in June after more than 60 years, as the council set out the full £7.6m plan for the ground.
Sand on the new pitch
The artificial pitch is being finished. A spreader has been running up and down the surface pouring sand into the fibres, the infill that gives a 3G pitch its grip and its give, and by Tuesday a wide band of the field was buried in it.
Kerbs are being laid along the paths around the pitch, and new galvanised rails have gone in behind the dead-ball line.
Steel on the seafront side
On the Mumbles Road side, the steelwork for the new stand is going up, with a telehandler and cherry pickers raising columns onto concrete pads. The club’s plan puts a new stand there, moves the existing stand to the Mumbles end and adds a fan zone at the Guildhall end, for a finished capacity just under 7,000.
It is a 1,000-seat stand, and it has a name before it has a crowd: JCP Solicitors signed a six-figure deal last week to call it the JCP Solicitors Stand until 2031, the club’s longest-dated commercial agreement since it left Bridgend.
The old terrace, stripped to the steps
Across the pitch, the terrace on the Bryn Road side has been cleared back to its concrete steps. The rusted crush barriers have been cut out and stacked, new galvanised ones are already bolted in, and a mound of broken blockwork sits where the top of the terrace met the houses.
Weeds between the steps and the flaking yellow paint on the step edges give away how long it has stood empty.
A row of faded orange and brown seats is still fixed along the rail at the top, next to a peeling sign whose message has half gone.
This is the terrace that will have no roof when the Ospreys move in. The club said last week that a covered terrace has been pushed to a later phase with no date, and offered terrace season members a seat in the Family Stand instead.
What happens next
The first game is Gower College against Cardiff and Vale College at 2.30pm on Wednesday 7 October, with Swansea University against Bath that evening. Swansea RFC play Ebbw Vale on 10 October, 150 years after they first made the ground their home.
The Ospreys’ first match is against the Dragons at 7pm on Saturday 24 October, with Cardiff a week later. Tickets for the Dragons game went on sale at 10am on Tuesday, in a capped first allocation the club says will grow as “operational milestones and remaining venue approvals” are completed. Richard Lancaster, the club’s managing director for business, said October “isn’t simply about one Ospreys fixture”, with schools, colleges, the university and Swansea RFC all using the ground.
Swansea Council is putting £7.6m into the ground and the Ospreys £2.6m, on a 50-year lease.
In return the council takes the freehold of the clubhouse and changing rooms on Bryn Road, folded into the Ospreys’ lease, and says its money secures community use for around 90 per cent of available hours outside major fixtures. Sport has been played on the site since 1876; cricket, there for a century and a half, moved to Sketty Lane after last season.
The Ospreys are building a home while their future is decided by someone else. The Welsh Rugby Union has guaranteed Cardiff and the Dragons two of three licences from 2028/29, leaving the Ospreys and the Scarlets to fight for the one left in the west.
Dave Reddin insisted on Friday that the cut is going ahead, calling it “the brutal economics of it all”. Swansea Council has resumed its High Court challenge against the union, and the process that decides who survives starts in December.
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