Wrexham's slice of Premier League life will catapult the club and town into the big time

A shadow looms large over The Racecourse.

Don’t worry: it’s not some giant lizard intent on stomping down the central business district. Instead, visitors to the oldest international soccer stadium in the world might just have noticed an absolutely immense structure springing up behind one of the goals.

The new Kop is going to make quite a statement and address a number of pressing needs as Wrexham continues an unprecedented scaling-up process. It’s nowhere near complete – the hope is to accommodate a couple of thousand fans in it by March and have it up and running next season – but the structure is taking shape.

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Its significance is becoming clearer, too. The sheer scale of the thing puts me in mind of another soccer stadium that defines the skyline of its city.

Newcastle United’s iconic St James Park isn’t just a place of worship for the faithful; it’s a symbol of a proud northern city. Perched on a hill which is one of the conurbation’s highest points, it dominates Newcastle and can be seen from most vantage points in the area. Stadiums are regularly compared to cathedrals for the faithful who flock there every week and, like all clichés, there’s a basis of truth to it.

St James Park makes me think of Lincoln Cathedral. Rubber-stamped by William the Conqueror, then destroyed first by fire and then an earthquake, when it was rebuilt in the Fourteenth Century it was the tallest building in the world, and retained that title for two and a half centuries, probably because there weren’t many Godzillas in Lincolnshire in those days.

Its height was enhanced by being built on a steep hill in the centre of the city, and, as Lincoln is surrounded by The Fens, a large flat area popular with tourists and haters of contours, it really can be seen for miles around. It’s a remarkable piece of urban planning which puts its implant, and that of the church, into the region.

Fast forward to the modern era, and sport is the current object of devotion. Newcastle’s stadium fulfills a similar purpose to Lincoln Cathedral. Its siren call on match day is irresistible for a soccer-mad population, and Rob and Ryan hope Wrexham’s Kop can do the same as it looms over the hill into town.

The builders seem to have got a lot done since the weekend: there’s lots of concrete stuff on the sides and shiny glass on the back that wasn’t there on Saturday (in case you haven’t guessed, I’m not a qualified architect.)

It’s already shaping up to be a remarkable edifice, and the architects have done a fine job of shaping it to reflect the fabric of the region.

Wrexham was a significant location in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. As a market town, it was already a nexus between markets and suppliers, and by happy geological coincidence, that status was enhanced as factories and trade exploded in the Nineteenth Century.

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Slate from north west Wales, coal from across the region and the produce of the world’s first steel works, built on the fringes of Wrexham passed through the town along with the very ground our ancestors trod.

Cefn Stone, the predominant sandstone in the region, was hewn from quarries in the area – including one which was converted into The Rock, the stunning home venue of Wrexham AFC Women – and spread far and wide as a building material.

Likewise, the richly-red Ruabon brick earned the region the name “Terracottapolis” as it was exported widely. The second great wave of British universities were built from it, and, as a consequence of their distinctively florid appearance, were known as “redbrick universities”.

The new stand will reflect this, with a façade of similarly-coloured brick suggesting the heritage of the region. It’s all so pleasingly well-conceived that I can’t help feeling a sense of civic pride when I contemplate it.

When it’s finished it will be the second-most significant building in the region, both architecturally and symbolically, after our own Anglican church, St Giles, which towers over the centre of town and lent its design to the quadrangle of Yale University, whose benefactor, Elihu Yale, is buried in the churchyard.

It will almost double the capacity of the stadium, and provide much-needed infrastructure for a club whose vertiginous rise has outstripped the pace at which it’s physically possible to revamp the facilities at a “famous old stadium…crumbling down”

Just having somewhere to leave our bags would be a start. When Premier League clubs Nottingham Forest and Chelsea played at The Racecourse last season, they each caused logistical problems by arriving the day before with an entire busload of equipment for their support staff, which they left in the narrow corridors of the stadium, making it difficult for staff to negotiate their way around their place of work!

Now we’ll have a stand to be proud of, a statement which spreads our story even further, and room to accommodate more fans and bigger opponents. As long as that pesky old Godzilla doesn’t turn up before the concrete sets.