In 1923, an unremarkable patch of northwest London was chosen as the location for a gigantic new stadium. This is the strange and glorious story of how “Wem-ber-lee” became an iconic landmark in British pop culture
In 1923, an unremarkable patch of northwest London was chosen as the location for a gigantic new stadium. This is the strange and glorious story of how “Wem-ber-lee” became an iconic landmark of British pop cultureWhen she was a kid, Ellen White played Wembley. This is how you play Wembley when you’re a kid, and you’ve never actually been to Wembley: someone goes in goal and everyone else tries to score past them, and the last person to score goes out. It gets frantic. Shins are kicked.
Wembley is the ultimate for pop stars, too. Take That sold out eight nights at Wembley in 2011, and to Gary Barlow the stadium is “the business”. His bandmate Howard Donald remembers looking around at the 90,000 empty seats during a soundcheck and wondering, “How the hell we were going to fill this massive place?”
But there was a time when the word Wembley meant nothing. In the middle of the 19th century, it was a thickly wooded hill in the Middlesex countryside, home to barely 200 people. There were broad, open pastures and an orchard. Wild herons stood in its streams. But Watkin’s Folly, as it became known, never got that far. Though construction started in 1891, by 1899 the foundations had cracked, the steel was starting to sink, and when Watkin died in 1901, all that remained of his vision was a 40-metre stump, lying rusting and unloved. In 1907, even that relic was blown up with dynamite, leaving four deep craters on Wembley Hill.
Wembley — close to London, well connected, but still undeveloped — was chosen as the site. By April 1923, Wembley Hill was gone. Three thousand trees had been cleared, and 150,000 tons of clay dug out and removed. Over 300 working days, a gigantic stadium rose in the hill’s place.
“Already it had a legend, within 24 hours of opening its gates for the first time,” says Nige Tassell, author of, a recent history of the stadium. “Everyone knew of Wembley suddenly; it wasn’t just this anonymous place.” It was not all benign. The sketchy approximations of colonial cultures were peopled with colonial subjects who had little privacy and little say in where they went or what they could wear, and were gawped at by white Europeans. London’s Union of Students of African Descent complained that West Africans had been brought to the exhibition “to be ridiculed”.Getty Images
With money saved from his tobacco business he bought up a building at a time, breaking it up and selling its parts for a profit, and moving on to the next one. The stadium itself went into liquidation, and Elvin persuaded White to sell it to him for £122,500. There are about 30 of us, mostly half-term families with pre-teen kids in tow, and a couple of dads with a couple of primary-school lads. Most are Brits, though there’s a family from Croatia and one from Italy, plus a couple of international students.
Estimates vary for how many people attended the opening of the Empire Stadium on 28 April, 1923. Up to 250,000 is likely On a matchday the Wembley pitch is an impossible, hallucinogenic green. It’s so green it looks as if it’s vibrating slightly, wobbling your eyes in their sockets. But even today, a murky winter morning, it is startling.
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