If someone says ‘Wembley’ to you, you’ll most likely instantly think of a stadium,
Wembley Stadium, or if you’re a bit older, you’ll also think of a stadium, Wembley
Stadium, huh.
But did you know that we almost had an Eiffel-Tower-esque tower here that was would have beaten out
today’s Shard and every other structure in Europe today?
Probably not.
This story starts with the conclusion of another – the completion of construction on the
Eiffel Tower in 1889, which is close enough to 1885 that I can use this.
[intro] So cool.
This fancy new iron tower or at least what it represented is quite important, as it showed
the things you could build with this new material, which was only just starting to come into
its own.
At roughly the same time, Tower Bridge in London was also showing the capabilities of
a steel and iron structure – don’t be fooled, just look at the interior.
Those beams.
Crystal Palace nearby, the soon to be constructed Blackpool, Brighton towers, showed everyone
what impressive structures you could build with iron – more specifically, how tall
you could build them.
Here comes this chap - Sir Edward Watkin.
Knight.
MP.
Guy in the title, and also chairman of what was to become the Metropolitan line of the
Tube, and arguably ahead of his time.
He attempted to build a Channel Tunnel 113 years before the one we all know today – his
turned out to be a massive flop but that’s not the point.
He also actually built a rail link, known as the Great Central Main Line that would
act like a high-speed spine for the country, starting at the crossing into France.
That exact concept is planned to be built in the next decade in the form of High Speed
2.
Yeah, so he was quite ahead of his time, or at least when it came to trains.
So, he owns the Metropolitan Railway, that reaches from Central London to the rural countryside
of Middlesex in the north-west.
He wants, as any businessman does, more use of his trains.
He wants something to draw in the crowds of London to use his trains to get to this thing.
This attraction.
This great wonder.
Something current, something amazing, something – tall.
Ah ha.
He happens upon the idea of building a park out in the country to attract visitors – a
park that would most easily accessible from his railway line.
Clever.
Its centrepiece would be a 358-metre-tall tower, made of iron and steel, to attract
people, to make money for himself and also I think to beat the French with their silly
baguettes and silly boulevards and silly neon lighting and silly photography and filmmaking
and silly cars and silly antibiotics.
It’s a good thing we don’t have this petty nationalism nowadays.
[cut to EU riots or something] In 1890, Watkin holds an architectural competition
to find a design suited to his vision – some are completely loopy, some are actually genuinely
loopy, and out of the 68 submitted, he picks this one – an octagonal base which will
reach up 358 metres or 1175 feet in old-fashioned units.
It will beat out the Eiffel Tower by 45 metres and everyone will want to climb it – cool.
Construction of the foundations of his magnificent tower started in 1892, in the recently-purchased
Wembley Park.
You may think that Wembley is one massive green space like Hype Park or Regent’s Park.
However, this name is more a remnant of an old noble estate that had been there – don’t
expect to find massive green space there now – apart from there.
Back then, it was pretty rural, and actually had been landscaped before, when it was an
estate – perfect for becoming an amusement park.
Watkin also added a stop to serve his new attraction in between Kingsbury and Neasden
and Harrow – called appropriately Wembley Park.
It’s still there as a fully functioning station today.
The amusement park was to have cricket pitches, a lake, a waterfall, sports areas, gardens,
you name it.
But back to the tower.
Because these things weren’t exactly that cheap, especially one this big, and because
the public didn’t exactly want to pay for it before it existed, Sir Edward had to fund
it with funds from his own company.
As is British tradition, this is where things started to go wrong.
As a result of the money problem, he scaled back his design from an octagonal tower to
one with only four legs, that I’ve swear I’ve seen before but I can’t quite recall
where.
Oh well.
Anyway, the actual Park opened in April and May of 1894, as did the Tube station, even
though the first stage of the tower wasn’t even finished yet.
This was more to serve the surrounding parkland as entertainment, because that could still
make money in the meantime, as it did, drawing in 100,000 people in just three months.
Around September of 1894, things go very very wrong, in two main ways.
Number 1: Sir Edward Watkin retired from ill health, leaving the project without a visionary
(never good) and Number 2.
Subsidence.
Because the tower had half-as-many legs as originally planned, they were actually sinking
into the ground and causing the whole structure to shift.
Wembley wasn’t exactly the driest of places, described in 1973 as ‘slushy fields and
grass farms’.
The devil’s in the details.
If you’re wondering, things don’t get any better.
The workers stop around 1894.
The company financing the build goes into liquidation in 1899, Watkin dies in 1901,
and the tower is never completed.
By 1907, the frame had sunken further and it was affectionately called by the locals
‘Watkin’s Folly’, the London Stump or my favourite ‘the massive Gazebo’.
Huh, I wonder if Americans know what a gazebo is.
Oh well.
The remains of the tower were demolished, or should I say blown up with dynamite in
1907, which must have been really cool, oh well.
However, from this view it looks like the entire thing was a failure, but not quite.
Time does heal most wounds, ash is the most fertile for growth, other sayings relating
to success after failure, you know, those ones.
The recreational park Watkin created kept going, and actually started thriving.
By providing a very accessible sport ground and recreational area to a sprawling urban
metropolis, people of course loved it.
They kept expanding pitches, and even added a golf course in 1912.
So, after the First World War when the capital of the British Empire wanted to hold an exhibition
about the British Empire, the British Empire Exhibition, they picked the flourishing Wembley
as the host, leading to the massive construction of the Empire stadium, a massive piece of
sporting infrastructure that could seat 125 thousand people and was built exactly on the
site of where the tower once stood.
The exhibition was a huge success, people now knew the name Wembley, and more houses
and people flocked to the location.
I’m also told the very same exhibition is the setting for one of the first scenes in
the Kings Speech film, which is cool.
Then another war rolled around, and London was chosen to host the first Olympic Games
since then in 1948.
Where better than a place with a stadium already.
Yes, Wembley Park hosted the DAMN OLYMPICS.
Not bad for a failure.
The name of Wembley kept going, the Empire stadium was renamed the Wembley Stadium and
was demolished in 2000 to build a bigger, better stadium, still called Wembley stadium.
It’s hosted a EUFA Championship, it’s the home of English football, it’s got that
instantly recognisable arch, it’s a thriving London suburb, a name recognisable across
the nation.
Other towers, like the New Brighton Tower I mentioned earlier were only passing wonders,
soon being demolished or destroyed and forgotten.
But, in a weird twist of events, failing to build a fashionable attraction has in the
long term benefitted people more.
Kinda weird.
One last thing, to end our story.
When they built the new stadium, this shiny new one with the arch, they lowered the level
of the pitch and, completely by accident, they rediscovered the old foundations of Wembley
Tower, that started the whole thing over 100 years ago.
I’ve been Zepherus, and thank you for watching.