A HEREFORD architect has been given the go-ahead to start work on a new multi-million pound stadium in Liverpool.

Paul Hyett, chairman of London-based RyderHKS, met the American owners of Liverpool Football Club in New York recently and re-submitted designs for the 70,000-seater stadium.

Despite the headlines surrounding the future of the club, owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett made their final decision last week. Paul said he was delighted with the decision.

"It is fantastic news," he said. "It is now time to roll up our sleeves and get to work but it will be a great thing to build."

Paul, who spent his childhood sketching the villages and churchyards of Here-fordshire, left Hereford Cathedral School with only three O-Levels and failed an A-level in his favourite subject, history.

He couldn't get a place at college or university and so joined the Merchant Navy at 18 and travelled the world - mainly working on educational cruises around the Mediterranean - showing schoolchildren the sights of ancient Rome, Venice and Athens.

"I always have my sketchbook with me, as I have since I was a child going to the villages and churchyards around Hereford on my bike to draw them," he said. On his return to Britain, Paul gained a fourth O-level and won a place at the Canterbury College of Art.

Inspired by his father, the Hereford architect Derek Hyett, and spurred on by his own love of drawing, he studied architecture but, as his designs were being described as "interesting but not architecture", he ended up selling them to magazines and was directed to join London's Archit-ectural Association - earning a diploma in the subject.

Paul trained as a planner, studied architecture at university and wrote a weekly newspaper column while building up his own business - Paul Hyett Arch-itects. From 2001 to 2003 he was honoured to be nominated president of the Royal Institute of British Arch-itects and since then has merged his business with firms based in Newcastle and in the US to form RyderHKS.