In at the deep end - a visit to Wembley Arena's former swimming pool.

  

Guest post by Graham Cooksley, with an introduction by Philip Grant

 

Public swimming at the Empire Pool, late 1930s. (Wembley History Society collection)

 

If you read the “Wembley Matters” series about the history of Wembley Arena, written for its 90^th anniversary in 2024, you will know that it originally included a swimming pool. It was known as the Empire Pool, and what an amazing pool it was! When it opened in July 1934, Wembley’s new pool was the largest covered swimming bath in the world, 200 feet (almost 61 metres) long, 16 feet (almost 5 metres) at the deep end, and holding 700,000 gallons of heated water. As well as the main pool, with Europe’s first wave machine, there was a paddling pool for children, a “fountain pool”, 250 changing rooms and 1,250 lockers.

 

Advert for the Empire Pool.
(from the back cover of a 1934 British Empire Games swimming programme)

 

The pool was used for public swimming and international competitions in the summer during the 1930s, but covered over during the winter months for ice hockey matches and skating, among other sports events. It was last used as a pool for the swimming and diving competitions, and the water polo finals, at the 1948 Olympic Games. 

 

The finish of a swimming race at the 1948 Olympic Games. (Image from the internet)

 

But the pool was not filled in, and still kept the original “temporary” wooden floor over it until that was replaced with a stronger concrete covering in 1974. Graham Cooksley, who posts interesting and historic images and stories about the Stadium and Arena on “X” (formerly Twitter) and Instagram @wembleyarchive1923, recently had a tour of the former pool, and kindly offered to share the experience with “Wembley Matters” readers. If you want to know “what lies beneath” the arena floor (not that horror story), please read on! Graham writes:

 

Since starting my Wembley Stadium and OVO Arena Wembley collection many years ago it has, since learning that the old Empire Pool still remained underneath the floor of the arena, been a long-held desire to view it one day.

 

In an email correspondence with the Arena team (I write a monthly heritage blog for their Social Media pages) a cheeky ‘would it be possible to view the old pool’ request developed over a few weeks into a calendar date for May 2026 when we would be visiting for a day’s play in the World Table Tennis World Championships.  This Arena visit was my first since a David Bowie gig back in 2003 so that was good enough, but to get to see the old pool would be “Christmas day for an eight year-old” levels of excitement, but for a 57 year-old. 

 

Meeting my contact at the OVO Arena at mid-day, while France v Romania Ladies was still ongoing, we made our way into the open plan offices where we met our guide from the estates team.  Hard hats were issued, and a service elevator took us down to the basement.  The underworld of the Arena is a strange mix of storage including old vending machines, standing as if waiting to be filled and used, cabling that would rival any underground station, and runs the entire length of the arena, and horizontal and vertical pipes and beams which criss-cross each other thus making those hard hats essential.

 

1. The holes for the wave making machine. (All numbered photos by Graham Cooksley)

 

First stop on this underworld tour were four cavernous holes in the floor, these were where the wave making machinery, the first in Britain, were located.  Ladders still take maintenance teams down to occasionally pump out water that still gathers in areas, probably due London’s soft clay.  Then we approach the actual swimming tank.  

 

2. Looking towards the deep end, with the ‘A’ frames and their black sheets.

 

Bathers 90 years ago would have stepped down into the waters from poolside changing lockers, whereas we walked into it through various breeches in the surrounding tank ‘wall’ and given the change of orientation that took place during the arena’s refurbishment twenty years ago, we are straight into the deep end.  Mezzanine walkways in the tank are surrounded by strange large ‘A’ frames with stretched black sheets, these we are told are for sound proofing the underworld during music acts, the vibrations from which can cause damage to the structure of the building.

 

3. One of the lamp holes in the side of the swimming pool.

 

4. The overflow channel (in black) near the top of the pool’s tank.

 

Lamp holes line the sides of the tank, some are used as cabling through points while some still retain their ‘glass’ which would have shone so brightly in those illuminated prewar days.  Around the rim of the tank the water overflow channel remains, just waiting for someone to grab hold and kick the water once again.  On the floor of the deep end is a dust covered ‘Public Toilets’ sign. How many years has that laid there? I offer it a good home, but the request is unanswered.   

 

5. The ‘Public Toilets’ sign at the bottom of the pool’s deep end

 

6. A ‘plug hole’ in one of the concrete floor beams.

 

Directly above us France and Romania continue their game but we are directed to view some small round holes in the 1974 concrete floor, our guide tells us that these are literally plug holes. At the end of an ice season the machinery would be switched off and the melting water would drain through these holes and into the swimming tank to be pumped out.  One ingenious feature in the existing concrete floor is / was a network of pipes embedded to freeze water and to form the rink.  

 

7. Some of the embedded pipes, exposed in a section of the original floor.

 

One end of the newly-built Empire Pool in 1934, with a corner water tower arrowed.

 

The underworld space gets more limited as the concrete floor above us gradually meets the pool floor as it shallows out over the length of the building, but as we leave the underworld there is one last stop to look up into the interior of one of the four iconic corner towers of the OVO Arena.  These are water towers and still have the pipework inside them and could still work if ever needed.  Sadly, our tour ends, it’s been fantastic and now eight weeks later it was such a privilege, and we are so grateful to the Arena team for making it happen. 

 

Graham Cooksley. 

The Empire Pool / Wembley Arena Story - Part 4

 The fourth and final part of the guest blog by local historian Philip Grant on a key piece of local history. Many thanks to Philip Grant for his tireless efforts to ensure our local history is acknowledged and celebrated.

 

1.  The original (west end) entrance to Wembley Arena in 2003. (Image from the internet)

 

Welcome back for the final part of this story. As we saw at the end of Part 3, the Empire Pool had been renamed Wembley Arena, and although it was still home to some sporting events, it was now being used mainly to stage music and entertainment shows.

 

If I tried to name all of the acts who have performed at the Arena, the list would take up the rest of this article. I will just mention a few, and if I miss one of your favourites, you are welcome to add your memories of the time(s) you saw them at Wembley in the comments below. Among the top British bands that have performed here are The Rolling Stones, The Who, Status Quo, Queen, The Police and Dire Straits. The first two of those both had drummers from Wembley, in Charlie Watts and Keith Moon!

 

It would be unfair if I didn’t also name a few of the top acts from overseas that have also performed here since the name was changed in 1978. Did you see ABBA, AC/DC, Diana Ross, John Denver, Madonna, Meat Loaf, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston or Stevie Wonder at Wembley Arena? If so, please feel free to add your memories below.

 

2.  A Torvill & Dean programme from 1985, and a recent Holiday on Ice show. (Images from the internet)

 

One of the original purposes of the Empire Pool was to provide an ice-skating rink. Although Wembley stopped staging its own ice pantomimes, spectacular touring productions from the “Holiday on Ice” franchise have been a regular feature at Wembley Arena since 1978. If you saw it on TV, as I did, you will never forget Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s gold medal-winning “Bolero” ice dance at the 1984 Winter Olympics. The following year, as part of their World Tour, they sold out the Arena for seven weeks with their own ice show.

The building was now more than fifty years old, and in the late 1980s Wembley Stadium Ltd invested £10m to upgrade the Arena’s facilities for both performers and the paying public who came to see them. The improvements allowed even more spectacular effects to be included, as the 1990s saw more than 900 concerts performed at the venue. One of the most unusual for Wembley was an arena staging of Puccini’s opera “Turandot” by the Royal Opera in 1991 (building on the popularity of the aria “Nessun Dorma”, which the BBC had used as the theme tune for its coverage of the football World Cup in Italy the previous year!).

 

3.  Concert of Hope, George Michael singing in 1993, and watching other performers with Princess Diana.
(Images from the internet)

 

Charity events had been a feature of the Arena’s programme for decades. The annual Concert of Hope for World Aids Day was supported by Diana, Princess of Wales, and top performers, including another famous musician who grew up in Brent, George Michael.

 

 

Cliff Richard, who first performed here in 1960 as part of a NME Poll Winners’ concert, had 49 shows at Wembley Arena in the 1990s, and was still packing the venue with his 50^th anniversary tour in 2007. A different genre of pop music also came to the Arena in the nineties, with shows from boy (and girl) bands, including Take That, Boyzone, The Spice Girls and Westlife. Two of those groups were from Ireland, but another Irish import, Michael Flatley’s “Lord of the Dance”, was so successful in 1997 that it returned for 21 sell-out shows the following year.

 

4.  “Lord of the Dance” programme and video screenshot. (Images from the internet)

 

February 1999 saw the first solo stand-up comedy act at the Arena (many more would follow) when Eddie Izzard performed “Dress to Kill”, in aid of The Prince’s Trust. Britain (and Brent’s) increasing cultural diversity also saw Wembley Arena hosting more Asian / Bollywood music shows, by performers including Amitabh Bachchan and Asha Bhosle.

 

5.  Eddie Izzard programme and Asha Bhosle poster. (Images from the internet)

 

By the end of the twentieth century, the original Wembley Stadium was about to be demolished and replaced. It had been bought, together with around 100 acres of land that Arthur Elvin’s company had acquired, by the Football Association’s Wembley National Stadium Ltd, but they were not interested in redevelopment. In 2002, they sold some of the land, including the Arena, to Quintain Estates and Developments Plc, which eventually bought 85 acres of Wembley Park.

 

Wembley Arena was only eleven years younger than the 1923 stadium, and Quintain were soon making redevelopment plans, including a major refurbishment of the Grade II Listed arena. Work began in February 2005, and included moving the main entrance to the opposite end of the building, with access from a new Arena Square (it is actually a triangle!). The project cost £36m, and the “new” 12,500-seat Wembley Arena re-opened on 2 April 2006, with a concert by Depeche Mode.

 

6.  The Wembley Arena redevelopment in progress, 2005. (Image from the internet)

 

You can see the Arena being refurbished in the photograph above, but beyond it you can also see an exhibition centre, a triangular office block and a round building, Wembley Conference Centre, which were built by the Wembley Stadium company in the 1970s. The Conference Centre had been the venue for the annual Masters Snooker Championship since 1979, but after Quintain demolished that building in 2006, to make way for its Quadrant Court flats development, “The Masters” moved to Wembley Arena from 2007 to 2011.

 

7.  Scenes from the Olympic badminton and rhythmic gymnastics events at Wembley Arena in 2012.
(Images from the internet)

 

We saw in Part 2 how the then Empire Pool was used for some sports in the 1948 Olympics, and when the Games came to London again in 2012, the now Wembley Arena played host to two different Olympic competitions. First it was the badminton events, followed by the rhythmic gymnastics. Together they brought hundreds of competitors, from more than fifty nations, and thousands of spectators to Wembley.

 

8.  Wembley Arena, with Hilton Hotel and LDO beyond, in 2013.

 

Redevelopment continued around the refurbished Arena and its square. Forum House was the first of Quintain’s many blocks of apartment homes, built between the western end of the Arena and Empire Way. The Hilton Hotel was another early addition, just across Lakeside Way (remember that the Empire Pool was built at one end of the British Empire Exhibition’s central lake!) from the Arena entrance. The former Wembley exhibition halls made way for the London Designer Outlet shopping centre, which opened in 2013, as did Brent’s new Civic Centre, on part of the site of the former BEE Palace of Industry, across Engineers Way from Arena Square.

 

9.  Arena Square, with Brent Civic Centre beyond, summer 2014.

 

Arena Square, with its seasonal fountains, has become a popular open space (especially since the trees planted along its Wembley Park Boulevard side have grown large enough to provide some shade). Another of its features, designed to celebrate some of the Arena’s most popular performers, is the Square of Fame. Although this is on nothing like the scale of the Hollywood Boulevard “walk of fame”, it has become an attraction in its own right. Madonna was the first star to have bronze casts of her hands put on display, in 2006. The most recent addition is Dame Shirley Bassey, in 2019, sixty years after her appearance in the first popular music show at the Empire Pool (although she continued to perform here well into the 21^st century).

 

10.  A Square of Fame compilation, showing some of the stars who have made their mark at the Arena.

 

In 2013, Quintain handed over the management of Wembley Arena to a U.S. music promotions company (now known as ASM Global). They, in turn, entered into a 10-year naming rights deal with Scottish and Southern Energy, so that the building became known as The SSE Arena, Wembley. This made little difference to the shows put on at the venue, which included the annual live final of the X-Factor TV talent show (with previous episodes filmed at Wembley Park’s Fountain Studios, until they closed in December 2016).

 

11.  Outside and inside The SSE Arena on X-Factor finals night. (Images from the internet)

 

The Arena’s name changed again, after SSE sold its retail business to another electricity supplier, OVO Energy, in 2020. What began in 1934 as the Empire Pool is now the OVO Arena Wembley. And twenty years after buying the Arena, Quintain sold it in 2022, raising capital to pay for the construction of more buy-to-let apartments as part of its continuing redevelopment of Wembley Park. Its owner is now ICG Real Estate, part of the private equity firm Intermediate Capital Group.

 

12.  OVO Arena Wembley, from across Engineers Way, July 2024.

 

I hope you have enjoyed discovering more about the history of this famous Wembley Park landmark and venue. It is a story that I have wanted to share for several years, and the building’s 90^th anniversary felt like a good time to do that.

 

As long ago as the 1990s, Brent Council and the Stadium company worked together to celebrate the sports and entertainment heritage of Wembley’s Stadium and Arena. They did this with a series of ceramic tile murals, which welcomed visitors coming from Wembley Park Station through a new subway and onto the newly pedestrianised Olympic Way. Unfortunately, in 2013, the Council agreed to allow Quintain to cover those tile murals with advertisements!

 

13.  Some tile mural scenes celebrating events from Empire Pool / Wembley Arena history.

 

Along with Wembley History Society and a number of local residents, I have been campaigning since 2018 to get these tile murals put back on public display. In 2022, Quintain agreed to put the mural scenes on the walls in Olympic Way, which they own, back on public view. They include the ice hockey tiled picture at the top of the image above.

 

The other four mural scenes in that image are on the walls of the subway, which Brent Council own. I had taken a photograph of the mural celebrating the Horse of the Year Show in 2009, but the other three images, showing a female singer (Shirley Basey?), an ice skater and a basketball player (Harlem Globetrotters?), are all extracted from old views of the walls. All four of these murals are still hidden from view, behind LED advertising screens.

 

Brent Council had the chance to put the subway murals back on public view from the end of August 2024, and there was a strong case for doing so. Sadly, Brent’s Cabinet was unwilling to consider that case, choosing instead to receive slightly more advertising rent. That decision will mean these parts of the Arena’s history (and more scenes from Wembley Stadium’s history) will remain hidden from residents and visitors for at least another four years.

Philip Grant.

 

Guest Post: Wembley Archive would love you to pay a visit

 

 1933

 

Guest post by Graham Cooksley (@Wembley Archive)

 

Launching on Twitter in 2022, the Wembley Archive (@wembleyarchive) channel sets about to record and highlight the rich heritage of Wembley Stadium, Wembley Arena and the wider footprint of the former exhibition grounds from their inception in the early 1920s.  

 

We are followed by Wembley Stadium, the OVO Arena Wembley, Wembley Park LDN, a descendant of Sir Arthur Elvin and many others. The channel is based around a collection of primarily non-football focused Wembley memorabilia, owned and developed by a private collector (myself) over many years.

 In our first year we have recorded the 100^th anniversary of the opening of Wembley Stadium with a series of ‘live tweets’ as if the events of the 1923 ‘White Horse Final’ were happening at that moment and we are nearing the 75^th anniversary of the 1948 London Olympics which also utilised some of the then remaining British Empire Exhibition buildings.  Of course, the exhibition itself turns 100 in 2024 when the Empire Pool, now OVO Arena, will also celebrate its 90^th birthday, busy days ahead.

As well as regular posts with a variety of items ranging from pre-war pageants to religious rallies, we have also learnt a great deal of information through the interaction with our readers and followers, so if you have an interest in all things Wembley and in particular the former Wembley Stadium complex site we would love you to give as a visit, follow and at the same time say hi.   

Graham Cooksley

@WembleyArchive

 

1944

 

 1946

 

 

1954

 

FURTHER UPDATE: OVO Arena's premises licence challenged by members of the public alleging assault and threats of violence by security staff against adult and a child

 UPDATE 23.3.23

A Spokesperson for Ovo Arena said:

"As our priority is to ensure the safety of everyone attending the venue, OVO Arena Wembley takes all customer complaints very seriously. We have co-operated in full with the Police and following thorough investigations by both venue and police, it has been concluded that no further action is required.We are co-operating fully with Brent Council and have provided them with all necessary information, policies and procedures to conduct the venue’s licence review."

 

 Brent Council's Alcohol and Entertainment Licensing Sub-Committee is to hear an unusual case on Tuesday March 28th. Two members of the public are applying for a review of the premises licence for the OVO Arena in Wembley, held by AEG Facilities (UK) Ltd.

The grounds for review are the Prevention of Crime & Disorder, Public Safety and the Protection of Children from Harm. One applicant alleges assault and threats of violence against himself and a minor by security staff. Another alleges detention without reason and sexual assault.

 

 

The Committee is informed:

 

These premises are currently licensed for Regulated Entertainment, Late Night Refreshment the sale of alcohol and to remain open 24hrs a day Monday to Sunday.

 

The steps the Committee may take are:

0. To modify, remove or add conditions
1.  To exclude the sale of alcohol or other licensable activity
2.  Remove the Designated Premises Supervison
3.  Suspend the licence for up to 3 months.
4.  Revoke the licence
   

 

A member of the public has submitted the representation below: 

 

 

 

 

And another has sent in this representation (statement begins at page 8) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 All the papers can be viewed HERE. The meeting takes place on Tuesday 28th March at 10am. The public and press may be excluded from some parts of the meeting:

 

Part of the consideration of Agenda Item 3 above may involve the disclosure of information classified as exempt under Paragraph 7 of Part 1 Schedule 12A of the Local Government Act 1972, namely: “Information relating to any action taken or to be taken in connection with the prevention, investigation or prosecution of crime”.

 AEG Facilities has been contacted for a comment.