Wembley Arena Pavilion opened in February with The X Factor and Westlife performing to sell-out crowds in the first week. Wembley Ltd. contracted The Arena Group to design and build the semi-permanent venue, which will continue to host some of the world's biggest music stars until the £32m refurbishment of the Wembley Stadium complex is completed.

The £4m temporary arena has the look and feel of a permanent building. It is insulated for heat and sound, is over 165 metres long, 70 metres wide and 17 metres high, has a seating capacity of 10,000, and offers a VIP corporate hospitality area and full backstage production facilities for organisers.

All four divisions of the Arena Group contributed skills and resources to create this unique venue. Arena Structures supplied its TFS structure and supplementary structures to create the venue. Arena Seating supplied and installed the 10,000 seats. Arena Scene provided 18 miles of scaffolding underneath the substructure of the venue to create a level venue. Arena Events, meanwhile, is the official preferred hospitality partner through 2005, taking bookings for hospitality packages in The View, the exclusive hospitality venue.

Arena Group also worked with acoustics consultancy Capita Symonds to design a double membrane within the venue to limit noise pollution and a set of speaker delays (supplied by Britannia Row) were incorporated into the venue to help manage the sound quality and levels. David Walley, Chief Executive of The Arena Group, commented: "It has been a great experience and pleasure working with Wembley Ltd. on such an innovative project. To create a venue of this size within four months of signing contacts is a testament to everyone involved. From our perspective we were only able to tackle this ambitious project by drawing on all of the skills within the Arena Group; pooling all of our knowledge and resources to exceed everyone's initial expectations."

Key 'partners' in making this happen were Brent Council, who have worked with Wembley Ltd. and the suppliers to facilitate the first temporary venue of this type in the UK, which complies to full permanent building regulations; ClearChannel Entertainments' John Probyn who project managed the build, and critical to the venue's infrastructure, Star Events Group.

Whilst the Arena Group TFS created a great venue it would not have fulfilled the weight loading requirements of the large incoming productions, so Arena Group joined the TFS on to the Star Events Group's VerTech staging system, typically for use on outdoor concerts and festivals but adapted with hard walls and a shutter door for easy load in and outs for this project and the created the worlds largest Orbit Arch halfway down the TFS to hold to the delay speakers.