Despite a tough season in the Premier League, Luton Town decided to significantly improve the playing facilities at their training ground ‘The Brache.’ White Horse Contractors were brought in to completely reconstruct a natural pitch and transform it into a fully stitched Hybrid pitch.

On the designated date, our team arrived and immediately began removing the existing pitch. The profile was lowered by 400mm using an excavator before sending the arisings to a site across from the training ground for a local school being built thus reducing the environmental impact of the project. We mobilised our specialist drainage machine, Mastenbroek 15/15 trencher. Drainage lines were installed using 80mm pipe at 4.5 metre centres to accommodate the existing drainage scheme. The gravel raft was instated below before the importation of 3550 tonnes of sand. The pitch specifications included under soil heating to maintain the grass throughout the cold winter. This was carried out at a depth of 250mm below the surface of the pitch.

The next stage of the construction process was to import 100mm of specialist upper rootzone. Then our team began the cultivations and soil amendments before the seeding of the pitch. Our partners at GrassMaster Solutions arrived on site to begin the stitching of over 20 million fibres into the surface using 2 Gen S machines. The new pitch has provided the club with a stable and reliable state-of-the-art playing surface for the first team to train on throughout the season. Despite the wet weather the new pitch is always in a great condition for players to train on.

After 10 years on their old hybrid sportsturf playing surface, the board have invested in a full upgrade of the playing surface. Operations manager Joshua Scott explains the benefits “10 years ago was the last time we did the pitch here, and in 2014 we were nominated for pitch of the year, it shows you each time you do a major renovation it makes a significant difference.”