Valley Parade will have a towering new addition next season.

The £2.5m all-seater Kop stand will dominate the skyline.

It will be twice as high as the existing Sunwin and Ciba stands and it will accommodate around 7,300 fans.

Already it has proved popular with the Bantams' followers. So far around 5,500 season tickets have been sold for the new stand.

It will have smoking and no smoking areas as well as bars, eating outlets and hospitality suites.

The work began in December and is due to be completed by the end of July.

It meant that the capacity of the popular Kop terrace being reduced to just 4,500 from 7,500.

A reduced capacity saw thousands of fans make the Midland Road stand their new home for the remainder of the season.

But many of them are expected to return to the new Kop stand when Premiership soccer arrives in August.

Plastic raincoats and woolly hats were in demand when the roof came off for the game against Wolves.

On that afternoon the temperature dropped but the rain stayed away.

The first phase of the building work saw the roof removed from the old Kop stand.

Much of the steel from the old stand has been re-cycled with 78 per cent being re-used.

The sheeting from the roof is now providing roofing for a factory in Wales.

The foundations of the new stand consist of 109 piles driven into the sandstone rock. The footings have been filled with 1,200 tons of crushed concrete from the old terrace.

In all the structure will contain 450 tons of steel and will be fastened together by 12,468 bolts.

The company responsible for building the stand are Ellenby Construction who constructed the Midland Road stand.

The man in charge of the work is site manager Paul Butterwick.

This is his football stadium development but he says: "It is very exciting and different to anything I have experience before.

"We have had a lot of interest from souvenir hunters. Some have wanted items such as the toilet signs while a group of City Gent contributors have asked for a pair of crush barriers so that they can install them at their local pub and carry on the banter they normally reserve for the terraces."

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