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 Chalkhill Estate that never was!

Guest post by local historian Philip Grant

1. Cover of the January 1963 Wembley Borough Council booklet.

 

When I wrote an illustrated article, “Chalkhill – 1,000 years of history”, in 2012, I was aware of three versions of the Chalkhill Estate, dating from the 1920s, late 1960s and early 2000s. I recently became aware of plans for a different renewal of the Chalkhill Estate, drawn up by Wembley Borough Council and published in January 1963. Although these plans for the Chalkhill and Barnhill Roads Redevelopment Area were overtaken following the creation of the London Borough of Brent in 1965, I think that readers may be interested to see what might have been!

 

Why was Wembley’s Borough Engineer and Surveyor considering the redevelopment of a private housing estate which had been laid out just over forty years earlier? He was responding to guidance issued by the then Conservative Government’s Minister of Housing and Local Government, Henry Brooke, in 1960:-

 

2. The “National Policy” paragraphs from the opening section of the January 1963 booklet.

 

Planning permissions for most of the suburban housing developments in Wembley and Kingsbury from the late 1920s and 1930s had specified housing densities of eight or ten homes per acre. The “Metroland” Chalkhill Estate was probably chosen as the area for Wembley’s first response to this call for ‘redevelopment at higher densities’ because its individual building plots had been sold off at sizes from a quarter of an acre upwards (with many homes there on half acre or one-acre plots). The grounds of “The Shalimar” at 43 Chalkhill Road were large enough for garden parties to be held there, as I’d discovered when I shared the remarkable story of “Ram Singh Nehra - a Wembley Indian in the 1930s” in 2021! By the 1960s, different builders had already started buying up properties there with large gardens for possible redevelopment. 

 

3. An early 1920s advert for building plots on the Metropolitan Railway’s Chalk Hill Estate.

 

From the mid-1920s onwards the Government had required local Councils to draw up a Development Plan for their area, which had to be approved by a Minister. Wembley’s outline amended proposals for the Chalkhill area had already been agreed by Whitehall:

 

4. An extract from the Redevelopment Area booklet, and 5. ‘the plan attached’ to it.

 

Under the proposed plan, the area would remain residential, with mainly low-rise homes, although with the possibility for up to three “tall” blocks of flats (no more than 11 storeys – compare that to Wembley Park today!) close to the station. Existing trees would be ‘preserved wherever possible’, and there would be good ‘pedestrian access through the area affording safe, convenient and attractive footways towards shops, transport and other public facilities.’ As more families then had cars, each development would ‘be provided with adequate parking spaces for motor vehicles.’

 

6. Paragraph about the types of homes from the Redevelopment Area booklet.

 

 

7. The key to the Redevelopment Area map.

 

Traffic problems in the Chalkhill neighbourhood were also addressed in the Redevelopment Area proposals. One of the most radical ideas was to make a short section of Chalkhill Road, nearest to Wembley Park station, a cul-de-sac, and to include a multi-storey car park there for station users and the shops in Bridge Road, with some new shops opposite.

 

8. Paragraph about fixing the through-traffic problem from the Redevelopment Area booklet.

 

 

9. Extract from the Redevelopment Area map with proposals for the western end of Chalkhill Road.

 

What had been the next section of Chalkhill Road would have become green open space under the proposals, with footpaths across it leading to Barnhill Road and the remaining part of Chalkhill Road. Having blocked the through-traffic “rat run”, the new main entrance to the estate would be from Forty Lane, opposite the Town Hall steps, running straight down to curve into Barnhill Road. New housing along the Forty Lane frontage would be set back from the main road, and accessed from service roads.

 

10. Extract from the Redevelopment Area map showing the new access from Forty Lane,

 

The Redevelopment Area proposals recognised that the higher density of homes on the estate would lead to a larger local population, with the Borough Surveyor writing: ‘A residential neighbourhood, if it is to include the means of satisfying the needs of its inhabitants, should contain adequate religious, education and social activities.’ One of the needs identified was for a new Primary School, and another was for a park. Although the exact locations for these could not be settled, the proposals recommended reserving land for these facilities between Barnhill Road and the Metropolitan railway lines.

 

11. Possible sites for a school and park on the Redevelopment Area map.

 

Chalkhill Primary School was built on part of this “reserved land” in Barnhill Road, with the infants’ section finished by the end of 1970, and the primary school fully open by 1972. However, residents had to wait until 2013 for the opening of Chalkhill Park!

 

Another of the proposals by which ‘the tendency for traffic to use residential roads for through travel will be stopped, and the obstruction of Blackbird Hill [and Bridge Road] by right-turning traffic will be avoided’, was ‘the connection of Chalkhill Road and Barnhill Road near the site of the proposed Catholic Church.’ How this was originally proposed, compared with what was actually constructed, can be seen on these maps:

 

12. Extract from the Redevelopment Area map and the modern Google Maps satellite view.

 

The two roads were connected via Ken Way, and Chalkhill Road was diverted round what became the site for the church, closing off a junction which was too close to the Blackbird Cross intersection. When the new English Martyrs’ Roman Catholic Church was built in 1969/70, to replace a temporary wooden church in Chalkhill Road which had opened in 1930, it was not the traditional rectangular shape shown on the 1963 map, but a beautiful modern round design.

 

13. English Martyrs’ R.C. Church under construction in 1969, and seen from Blackbird Hill
across the former Chalkhill Road junction in 2013.

 

Wembley Borough Council did not envisage building this new Chalkhill Estate itself. Instead, it set out its Redevelopment Area proposals as an overall guide for private developers of the principles it wanted to see applied by them in putting forward individual plans, which would work together over time to form a cohesive well-designed estate. This was explained in the booklet’s final section:

 

14. The final “Summary” paragraph from the Redevelopment Area booklet.

 

“Speculators” had already been buying up properties with large gardens, suitable for the what the Council proposals suggested as ‘satisfactory redevelopment units of not less than four acres’. One such planned development was already in the pipeline, and in the same month that the booklet was published this was the local newspaper’s front page story:

 

15. Headline about the start of Chalkhill’s “New Town”, 18 January 1963.

 

I’m not sure which development on the site of six houses the “Wembley News” article was referring to (possibly Windsor Crescent?), and if you know please share that information as a comment below. Clearly a start was made on the Wembley Borough Council Redevelopment Area scheme, but it did not get very far before Brent Council came into being in April 1965, and decided to build its own Chalkhill Estate!

 

16. An aerial view of Brent’s newly completed Chalkhill Estate, 1970. (Courtesy of Barbara Phillips)

 

Looking at the area now, you could believe that this late-1960s development was “the Chalkhill Estate that never was”, as the concrete “Bison” blocks of flats were demolished from 1997 onwards, to make way for another version of Chalkhill. But I hope this look at an alternative 1960s vision of the estate has provided an interesting piece of local history for you.

 

Philip Grant.

 

Acknowledgement: The late Geoff Hoggett worked in the Chalkhill area in the 1960s, and at some point acquired a slightly muddy copy of the Redevelopment Area booklet and plan. His interest in local history caused him to save them, and they were found by his daughter, Julia, rolled up in a cardboard tube, after his death. I’m grateful to her for sending them to me, so that I could share this story with you.

Two interesting talks at your Local History Societies in May

    Guest blog by local historian Philip Grant in a personal capacity.

Jeremy Waxman’s book about the letters.

 

Although the London Borough of Brent was created more than sixty years ago, there are still two Local History Societies in the borough, covering the areas of covered by the previous local councils of Wembley and Willesden. Many residents do not even know that they exist, but as they both have illustrated talks this month which may appeal to a wider audience, I’m taking this opportunity to let you know about them.

 

Wembley History Society’s meeting next Friday, 15 May at 7.30pm, welcomes Kingsbury High School’s former Head Teacher, Jeremy Waxman, who will share stories from his book “Letters to Miss Baker”:-

 

 

Daisy Baker was a teacher at Kingsbury County School from 1927 (before it moved to Princes Avenue!) until 1954. During the Second World War, she kept in touch with several hundred former students who were serving in the forces, and received more than 500 letters from them. These letters were rediscovered by Kingsbury High’s Head Teacher in 2017, when he was searching for archive material to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the school becoming a comprehensive (combining the former Kingsbury County Grammar and Tylers Croft Boys and Girls Secondaries). The first-hand wartime feelings and experiences included in the letters were an important piece of history, which Jeremy has brought together in his recently-published book.

 

Whether or not you are a former KHS student, this will be a very interesting talk. It is taking place in the church hall just behind St. Andrew’s New Church in Church Lane, Kingsbury. Wembley History Society welcomes anyone to its talks, and invites adult visitors to make a £3 donation, to help meet the cost of hiring the hall. Jeremy will also have copies of his book available to purchase at the meeting, which begins at 7.30pm on Friday. There are very good bus routes to this venue (including the 83, 182 or 297 from Wembley Park station – see details on poster above), and there is a small car park in front of the church if you can’t use public transport.

 

Willesden Local History Society’s monthly meeting, on Wednesday 20 May at 7.30pm, brings the past and future together with Irina Porter’s talk “Brave New World – Step into the past with AI”. She writes: ‘AI opens up a new historical world – are you brave enough to step into it? Watch the streets of Willesden come alive on screen!’

 

 

A postcard of Chapter Road from c.1900, transformed into colour using AI.

 

Irina continues: ‘Artificial intelligence is transforming historic photographs into colourised moving films, bringing hundred-year-old local streets and people into motion. Seeing the past move can be powerful, emotional, but at times unsettling. This presentation explores the promise of this new technology, as well as the moral issues associated with it and the risks it poses to historical accuracy and interpretation.’

 

Location map for Willesden Local History Society meetings. (Based on Google Maps)

 

The meeting is taking place at St. Mary’s Parish Church Hall, next door to Willesden’s historic St. Mary’s Church in Neasden Lane, London NW10 2TS. Again, this venue is easily reached by public transport, with the 297 bus stops at Wharton Close very close to the hall, and the 260 and 266 buses to Willesden Magistrates’ Court just round the corner. It is only a five-minute walk from Neasden Station on the Jubilee Line (or one stop from the station on the 297).

 

Like its Wembley counterpart, Willesden LHS also welcomes visitors to its meetings, in return for a small donation, so if this subject is of interest to you, please come along by 7.30pm on Wednesday 20^th.

Philip Grant.

Proposed Stopping-up Order near Olympic Steps – the outcome of Brent’s application to the Court on 16 April

 Guest post by Philip Grant in a personal capacity

 

Willesden Magistrates’ Court. (Image from the Courts Service website)

 

At the end of my previous guest post about Brent’s application to stop-up two areas of highway, just to the south of Engineers Way near the Olympic Steps, I said that I would see the Council in Court on Thursday 16 April – and I did! Brent was represented by a barrister from Landmark Chambers, supported by the Council’s top Transport Officer and a Senior Engineer, and by Quintain’s Head of Planning (it was Quintain who had asked Brent to apply for the Section 116 Highways Act 1980 Order). I was represented by – me!

 

I arrived early for the 2pm hearing, and had an amiable discussion with the Brent team and their barrister, who had sent me, late that morning, a four page “Applicant’s submission” document and a fifteen-page copy of a decided Highways Act court case (R. v Leeds City Council, ex parte Spice) which they would be quoting from in support of the application. I don’t know whether they thought this would intimidate me, but I assured them that I had plenty of experience in dealing with Statute and Case Law from my working life.

Heading from the front page of the “Spice” High Court Judgment document.

 

The Magistrate hearing the cases listed for Court 4 did not appear until around 2.30pm, but it was not because he was having a long lunch. It turned out that he had also only received the latest documents from Brent Council that morning! When we got to “our” Case 6, around 3pm, he asked me whether, in the circumstances, I would like an adjournment, so that I could consider these extra documents, and a one centimetre thick “Application Statement” (“AS”) which Brent had submitted to the Court on 7 April. I was only passed a copy of this by the barrister at the start of the hearing. I thanked him for the offer, but said that I was happy to proceed, as it was in everyone’s interests for the matter to be resolved without further delay.

 

Brent Council’s “Application Statement” document.

 

The barrister presented Brent’s application, setting out that the Council had complied with all of the procedural requirements for giving notice, and stating that the Section 116 Order was needed so that responsibility for maintaining the old areas of unnecessary highway could pass to Quintain, who had since developed the land. She referred to photographs in the AS showing the locations of the highway, including those for the eastern hatched area pictured here:

 

The “eastern area” photos from Brent’s Application Statement.

 

The barrister’s presentation went on for around twenty minutes, and then the Magistrate asked several questions. One was about the assurance which Quintain had entered into with Brent, which was claimed to reinforce the Section 106 planning condition which allowed public access to the land which was the subject of the application. He was particularly concerned with the wording in the final sentence of Quintain’s letter of 30 March 2023, a copy of which was at tab 11 in Brent’s AS. That sentence said:

 

‘Although the land will be stopped up, Quintain can confirm that it will remain open to the public and remain free for people to pass and repass over but for the avoidance of doubt there is no intention by Quintain to re-dedicate the land as highway and public access would be on a permissive basis only.’

 

Quintain’s 30 March 2023 letter (with personal names deleted for privacy).

 

The Magistrate felt that ‘on a permissive basis only’ suggested that the public would only have a “licence” to cross the land, not a firm legal right. Quintain’s Head of Planning said that was not what they intended – the company simply wished to ensure that parts of the public space could be closed off for maintenance on the occasional day when this might be necessary. There was a short break while a revised final sentence was drafted, which satisfied the Magistrate’s concerns.

 

I was then invited to present my case objecting to the application. I asked whether the Magistrate had a copy of the photographs evidence document, which I had sent to the Council in January, and had emailed a copy to the Court Office the previous week. He looked in his online case file and said that he had a copy, which he felt would be very useful. I then set out my arguments, that the application was wrong in law. 

 

Extract from the application Plan, showing the hatched areas.

 

Although I agreed with the Council that it was sensible to resolve the residual problem of who was responsible for maintaining the hatched areas of land, they did not need a Section 116 Order to do that. The proposed Order dealt with the land as it is now, and it was necessary for the public to continue to have ‘a right to pass and repass, either on foot or dependent on suitability in a vehicle’ over this land. The draft Order sought the Magistrate’s authorisation to stop-up this highway ‘for the purpose of all traffic and all public rights of way [to be] extinguished.’ But he could only sign the Order if the area of highway was unnecessary.

 

Two ‘key principles’ from Brent’s “Applicant’s Submission” to the Court.

 

I took the Magistrate through the photos I’d taken in January, one by one, and referring to the “Applicable Test” section of Brent’s submission, asked whether highway, such as Olympic Way East, was ‘unnecessary for the sort of purpose for which Justices would reasonably expect the public to use that particular way’?

 

One of my evidence photographs, showing a car crossing the hatched area into Olympic Way East.

 

I also made the point that if the Magistrate did sign the Order which Brent had prepared, it would create two completely contradictory situations for the hatched areas. Under the planning condition and the Quintain letter of assurance the public had the right to cross that land. Under the proposed Order the public’s legal right to cross those small areas of land would be extinguished. Although the public would see no practical change in their use of the land for now, it could create a legal nightmare in future. Public use of the hatched highway areas was necessary, and it was the Section 116 Order which was unnecessary.

 

The Magistrate asked me whether I was aware of Section 142 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984. I admitted that I had not read or considered it. He said that it was possible for a road not to be a “highway”, and from looking at my photos it appeared to him that Olympic Way East was not a highway, but a ‘road to which the public has access’. Similarly, the footway areas, such as that in front of the Olympic Steps, were not highway, but public space to which people had access.

 

The Magistrate said that he would retire to consider his decision, but would come back and give it verbally when he had done so. We waited in Court 4 for at least half an hour until we rose as he returned at around 4.30pm. In summary, he agreed with Brent that the legal status of highway was not necessary for the two hatched areas, so he would sign a copy of the Plan. However, he commended me for my public spiritedness in standing up for the legal right of the public to cross and recross those areas, and said that he would not sign the Order authorising the stopping-up of those unnecessary areas until its wording had been changed, to remove the reference to extinguishing all public rights of way.

 

Both sides left the Court satisfied with the outcome, and Council Officers emailed me a revised draft of the Order the following morning, inviting my comments or agreement. I recommended tidying up the wording over ‘highway maintainable at the public expense’, and suggested that to avoid any confusion over the previous and present uses of the hatched areas they should be described as ‘disused’ and ‘now being part of .…’ I’m pleased to say that my suggestions were accepted, and you can see the difference between the original and final versions of the Magistrate’s Order here:

 

Opening paragraph of the Section 116 Order document.

Closing section of the Section 116 Order document.

 

If the Notice last December about Brent’s application for a Stopping-up Order had included the final wording, I would not have objected to it. So much time and effort, over the past few months, for myself and Council Officers, could have been avoided. I think this underlines the point I made in my March 2026 guest post, that if Brent had (as it used to) a General Purposes Committee consisting mainly of experienced back-bench councillors, who could take the time to question Officers and get things right, rather than Cabinet members rushing through an agenda at 9.30am ahead of a 10am Cabinet meeting, the Council could avoid making some of its bad decisions.

 

There have been too many bad decisions made by Brent Council over the past decade or more, some of them wasting millions of pounds. I hope that the elections on 7 May will see a change in the balance of power, and bring in a majority of councillors willing to work together, across party lines where necessary, to improve scrutiny and decision-making. Scrutiny at Brent Council has been ineffective for too long, mainly because too much power has been in the hands of the same Leader. 

 

 

I have done what I can, on a variety of issues, to try to hold Brent Council to account, including as an honorary member of Martin’s unofficial “Committee” for around a dozen years, but it is time for official and effective scrutiny to pass back to elected councillors, where it belongs. I hope that readers will consider that when they decide who to vote for in May’s local elections.

Philip Grant.