by Richard Maddock, Kay Elliott
Traditional models of city-centre regeneration placed retail as the anchor, with offices dominating weekdays. But this model is failing. Bath Rugby’s new stadium highlights a broader shift in experience-led sports venues. One where city-centre destinations are redefining economic, cultural, and environmental sustainability.
The rise of the experience economy and the future of sports destinations
Major cities worldwide are rethinking how they drive economic growth. The experience economy is now recognised as a critical pillar of urban development.
The recently announced London Growth Plan looks set to name the experience economy as a strategic sector alongside financial services, education, and creative industries. Global cities are repositioning sports, entertainment, and leisure venues as cultural and economic anchors—not just standalone assets.
For decades, major stadia and entertainment destinations have been pushed to the urban fringe. Here, land is abundant, planning is simpler, and new infrastructure can be built around them. But this model is fundamentally flawed. It often requires vast new infrastructure—roads, car parks, utilities—at a high environmental cost. In addition, it isolates venues from existing economic and cultural ecosystems, limiting wider impact.
It also forces tens of thousands of visitors to travel privately. This then drives up Scope 3 emissions—those generated beyond the venue itself but directly linked to its operation. For stadia and location-based entertainment (LBE), these often dwarf both operational and embodied carbon, making location choice a critical factor in true sustainability.
Nowhere is the shift toward city-centre sports destinations more relevant—or more complex— than in the city of Bath. Bath Rugby is securing its future at the Rec—one of the most iconic and heritage-sensitive stadium sites in world sport, and the club’s spiritual home for over 125 years.
A new stadium for Bath
Located in the only dual UNESCO-inscribed city in the world, the proposed new stadium will replace the existing east, west, and north stands. This will increase capacity from 14,500 to 18,000.
The transformation will significantly enhance the matchday experience while providing improved hospitality, accessibility, and community facilities – ensuring the club’s long-term viability at the heart of the city. The new hybrid pitch will increase community and amateur sporting use, further embedding the stadium in the life of the city.
Kay Elliott, destination architects and masterplanners, have been shaping the experience economy for decades. Today, they bring their expertise in sports, entertainment, hospitality, and placemaking to one of the most heritage-sensitive stadium projects in the world.
The project is being developed through close collaboration between Bath Rugby, the wider design team and key stakeholders. This reflects the sensitivity of the site as well as the importance of balancing sporting, community, and heritage considerations.
While the project is still a live planning application, with determination anticipated in 2025, many lessons in the value of applying the principles of storytelling and immersive placemaking have already been learnt and are shared below.
Bath: the first experience-driven city?
Many cities have adapted to become leisure destinations. But Georgian Bath was designed as one. Long before the concept of theme parks or immersive destinations, Bath was engineered for leisure, wellbeing, and spectacle. First, the Romans built Britain’s most famous thermal spa complex, and later, the Georgians transformed it into a social playground for the elite.
Its hot springs made it a place of retreat and renewal. Bath’s pleasure gardens, pump rooms, and assembly rooms were created not as amenities but as attractions. And its Palladian architecture was also deliberately theatrical—a stage for society’s elite to see and be seen.
It’s no coincidence that the 18th century marked the birth of the first consumer revolution – with Georgian Bath as one of its greatest expressions. Just as today’s experience economy thrives on carefully designed environments, Bath was masterplanned as an immersive setting. One where architecture, commerce, and social spectacle were fully integrated.
From pleasure gardens to promenades, it might be considered an early forerunner to what we now call LBE. Stadium for Bath follows that same logic, embedding experience-led placemaking into the city’s next chapter.
The designs for Stadium for Bath seek not to compete with the city’s heritage—rather, they are shaped by it. The stadium is not simply placed within Bath’s historical context. It is embedded in its Palladian structure, social traditions, and landscape relationships.
Narrative placemaking: shaping the stadium through the history of Bath
Beyond the Roman city walls, Georgian architects had the freedom to expand their urban vision for the city. This is evident in the grand ensembles of Great Pulteney Street, The Circus, Queen Square, and the Royal Crescent, where Palladian principles were applied city-wide, defining Bath’s distinctive urban form.
The same classical principles underpin the siting of Stadium for Bath. Its positioning and alignment not only consider the requirements of elite sport but are also directly informed by Bath’s historic spatial hierarchy of symmetry and axial planning.
A further testament to Georgian innovation is the extensive use of vaults to address poor ground conditions, effectively raising the eighteenth-century street level by a storey. This created a clear social hierarchy—where parades, colonnades and grand facades framed public life, while millennia of history, along with industrial and commercial functions, remained below.
Stadium for Bath responds to this same city datum. Its open-plan hospitality floor is not just about hospitality. It aligns physically with Bath’s raised parades, reinforcing the city’s tradition of promenading and extending the ‘see and be seen’ culture into a modern experience-led destination.
At the same time, the pitch and improved public realm continue Bath’s tradition of green infrastructure along the riverside. This extends its role as a place for sport, recreation, and public gatherings.
Even the roof’s curvature is deliberate—opening key views while echoing the sweeping hills that frame the city.
A complex design challenge
Integrating a new stadium within Bath’s protected landscape presented one of the most complex design challenges possible. And the story is still unfolding. But, rather than seeing these constraints as limitations, the design embraces them. It uses them to refine the stadium’s form and reinforce its relationship with Bath’s urban grain.
The result is a stadium that actively seeks to extend the city’s architectural and social traditions into the present. This ensures that Bath’s DNA continues to shape its future, not just its past.
Kay Elliott has been shaping the experience economy for decades. Today, they bring together sports, entertainment, hospitality, and placemaking to create destinations that are commercially, culturally, and environmentally resilient.
Stadium for Bath aspires to be more than a stadium. It also aims to secure Bath Rugby’s future while setting a model for how major venues can evolve—merging heritage and innovation, sport and city, history and future. And proving that even within the world’s most protected cityscapes, sports and entertainment venues can become integrated, experience-led destinations.
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