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.

 

The Empire Pool / Wembley Arena Story – Part 3

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant

1.     The Empire Pool in 1948, looking towards Wembley Park Station. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

Thank you for joining me for the third part of this article. If you have just come across it, you may like to read Part 1 and Part 2 first. We have reached 1948, when Wembley had just played host to the 1948 summer Olympic Games, and the swimming pool had been used for the last time. Now the indoor arena would be used not only for sports, but also for a variety of other entertainment events which Sir Arthur Elvin (knighted by King George VI in 1947, for his efforts to stage the Olympic Games at Wembley) brought to the Empire Pool.

 

2.     Programmes for the Skating Vanities and Aqua Parade shows.
(From the internet and courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

Two of the early shows imported from America added a new twist to the Empire Pool’s programme. “Skating Vanities of 1949” featured singers and dancers on roller skates, not on the ice. The 1950 “Aqua Parade” brought its own pool, and was a variety show starring Buster Crabbe (an Olympic swimming gold medallist from 1932, who went on to play Tarzan in several 1930s movies) and Vicki Draves, who had won both the women’s Olympic high and springboard diving events at the Empire Pool in 1948.

 

It was not long before Elvin was putting on his own entertainment shows. The Christmas / New Year period had been the traditional time for pantomimes, and working with the theatrical producer, Gerald Palmer, the Empire Pool staged its first musical pantomime, “Dick Whittington on ice”, from Boxing Day 1950. It was a gamble, as the show cost £100,000 to produce (about £2.9m today), but 600,000 people went to see it over its nine-week run, and Wembley’s ice pantomimes became an annual event.

 

3.     Cover and “stars” page of the Dick Whittington programme. (Courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

1950 also saw the first visit to the Empire Pool of the Harlem Globetrotters. Their blend of basketball skills and comic trickery in the matches they played proved very popular, and they would return to put on their shows for a week in May or June each year right through until 1982! Sometimes the matches at Wembley were televised, and I can remember enjoying the antics of “Goose” Tatum and “Meadowlark” Lemon on a black and white TV set. Their performances helped to popularise basketball in this country (and the Empire Pool hosted the men’s and women’s national basketball finals from 1973!).

 

4.     A Harlem Globetrotters poster and Meadowlark Lemon in action, 1960s (From an old book)

 

5.     Programme for one of the shows put on at the Empire Pool in 1956. (From an old book)

 

Sir Arthur continued to work hard, putting on sports and entertainment events at the Empire Pool well into the 1950s, but his health was deteriorating. He was persuaded to take a break, and go on a cruise with his wife, but in February 1957 he died on board the S.S. Winchester Castle, off the island of Madeira. A bust of “Mr Wembley”, as he had become known, was placed on the wall of Wembley Stadium in his memory (it is now inside the new stadium).

 

6.     The bronze bust of Sir Arthur Elvin. (Image from the internet)

 

Although professional boxing matches had been one of the early sports to be featured at Wembley’s indoor arena in the 1930s, only amateur boxing had been held there since the war, with the ABA Championships taking place there every year from 1946 onwards. This was because Elvin had disliked the violence of some of the professional bouts he had witnessed. However, after his death the promoter, Harry Levene was quick to stage regular boxing events at the Empire Pool, featuring some big-name fighters.

 

7.     Programme for the Cooper v. Folley boxing match in 1958. (Image from the internet)

 

Henry Cooper’s World Heavyweight title eliminator against a top American boxer, Zora Folley, (above) was his first at the Empire Pool. He would have 14 more bouts at Wembley (including a famous one in the Stadium in 1963!) in an illustrious career, before he retired from boxing in 1971. A few months after that October 1958 event, the arena saw the start of something new.

 

8.     The young Shirley Bassey, and a second S.O.S. event in 1959. (Images from the internet)

 

March 1959 saw the first one-night popular music show at the Empire Pool. The Record Star Show was a charity event, organised by Vera Lynn’s Stars Organisation for Spastics. It featured top acts, including Petula Clark, Lonnie Donegan and a 22 year-old singer from Cardiff, Shirley Bassey, who had just had her first number one hit, “As I Love You”. The show was a big success, attracting a paying audience of 9,000 people, and a second event, the Starlight Dance, was held later that year. Similar multi-performer concerts continued into the 1960s, with events like the annual New Musical Express Poll Winners’ All-Star Concert.

 

The early 1960s also saw Associated Rediffusion (a subsidiary of the British Electric Traction Group) purchase Wembley Stadium Ltd for £2.75m. They already had the Independent TV franchise for broadcasting weekday programmes to the London area, most of which were televised from the former Wembley Park film studios. One of their most popular (at least with the younger generation!) shows was “Ready, Steady, Go!” When that programme staged its “Mod Ball” in 1964, Rediffusion’s nearby Empire Pool was the ideal venue.

 

9.     Mod Ball programme, and photograph of the event in the Arena. (From an old book)

 

 

10.  Mod Ball performers, at the back of the Wembley Park studios in 1964. (Image from the internet)
(How many of them can you recognise, sixty years on?)

 

With so many top British singers and groups in the 1960s, you might think that one of them would be the first to have their own show at the Empire Pool, London’s biggest concert arena at that time. Instead, it was the American pop group, The Monkees (which included the British singer/actor, Davy Jones), who took that first step in 1967, in what would go on to become one of the main features of the building’s future use.

 

11.  Ticket for a show by The Monkees at the Empire Pool in July 1967. (Image from the internet)

 

But sport was still an important part of the events staged in Wembley’s indoor arena. The Horse of the Year Show first took place there in 1959, and continued as an annual fixture in its programme right through to 2002. However, ice hockey, which had been one of the original sports that Elvin built the Empire Pool for, ended its run with the Wembley Lions final game there in December 1968 (the Monarchs having merged with the Lions in the early 1950s).

 

12.  Horse of the Year Show programme and showjumper in action, 1970s. (Courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

From the late 1960s and into the 1970s sponsorship played an increasing part in the staging of big events. 6-day cycle racing returned to the Empire Pool as the Skol-6, sponsored by a brewery with a new brand of lager to promote. From 1976, a top men’s professional tennis competition, the Benson & Hedges Championship, brought world-class players such as Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and Boris Becker to Wembley, courtesy of a tobacco company.

 

13.  Skol-6 poster and photograph. (Courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

The 1970s also saw a string of changes to the building. In 1974, the temporary floor over the swimming pool was removed, and a permanent arena floor installed. In October 1976, Sir Owen Williams’s 1934 building was given Grade II Listing heritage status, for its architectural and engineering merit. And from 1 February 1978, the Empire Pool name was confined to history, with the building to be known in future as the Wembley Arena.

 

Do you have memories of going to events at the Empire Pool / Wembley Arena? If so, please feel free to share them in the comments below. And please join me here again next weekend, for the final part of this story.

Philip Grant.

The Empire Pool / Wembley Arena Story – Part 2

 Guest post by local historian Philip Grant. Part 2 of a series.

 

1.     The newly finished Empire Pool, with the Stadium beyond, 1934. (Source: Britain from Above)

 

Welcome back for this second part of this story about Wembley Stadium’s “little brother”, the indoor sports arena originally known as the Empire Pool. As we saw in Part 1, it opened just in time to host the swimming and diving events for the 1934 British Empire Games. Its main entrance was at the western end of the building, accessed from the road which had been Raglan Gardens, but which was renamed Empire Way.

 

Although the swimming pool in summer and ice hockey/skating rink in winter were the main sporting facilities that the building was designed for, the floored-over pool soon found plenty of other uses. Before the end of 1934, it had already staged boxing and basketball matches, and a professional tennis tournament which became an annual feature. The big tennis attraction was British star, Dan Maskell, taking on top American players in the men’s singles.

 

2.     A women’s doubles match at the Empire Pool, 1930s. (Image from the internet)

 

Spectators at the Empire Pool could also enjoy a meal in its restaurant, overlooking the action from the second tier. Another attraction, on the same level, was a dance floor area, where people who had paid for public swimming or skating could relax for free after these activities, with a dance band playing each afternoon and evening. Arthur Elvin saw his new venture as a year-round centre for entertainment!

 

New sports were added to the programme in 1935, when the Empire Pool became the annual venue for the English Open Table Tennis Championships. This event drew in thousands of spectators, making a good profit. That year also saw the Amateur Athletic Association use the arena for its first indoor athletics championships, although the flat track with its tight bends was not to the satisfaction of some runners.

 

Elvin saw the chance to stage, for the first time in Britain, a new sporting event. Six-day cycle racing was proving very popular on the continent, but that would need a special banked track. He got Wembley’s team of craftsmen to build one for him! They did this in the stadium car park, designed in sections that could be carried into the building and fitted together for the event. The complete track was 178 yards (163 metres) in circumference, and cost £5,000 to construct.

 

3.     The cycle track under construction, 1936. (From an old book)

 

4.     A six-day cycle race in progress at Wembley, 1930s. (From an old book)

 

The race involved fifteen teams, each with two riders (with Dutch and Belgian professionals at the forefront), at least one of whom had to be on the track whenever the race was in progress, day and night for 143 hours. As well as the total distance covered, there were extra points to be gained during five-lap sprints every hour, as well as prize competitions for money, including for the fastest mile (ten laps of the track). The German pairing of Kilian and Vopel won the 1936 race, having ridden 1,939 miles!

 

Spectators could pay to come and watch the six-day race at any time, and many did, so that it became an annual event. But what did they do with the huge track, which filled the arena, for the other 359 days of the year? Just across the road from the Empire Pool was the former Palace of Arts building, and Elvin’s Stadium company now owned it, and used it for storage.

 

5.     European Swimming Championships programme cover, 1938. (Courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

By 1937, Wembley’s ice rink was welcoming the British Figure-skating Championships. The pool was being used less of the time, because events at the sports arena proved more profitable, but it was uncovered and refilled for the European Swimming Championships in August 1938. Germany, whose flag was then red, with a black swastika in a white circle, topped the medal table with 14 in total (including five gold and seven silver). 

 

The following month, Adolf Hitler’s Munich Agreement with Britain, France and Italy (but not Czechoslovakia, whose territory it gave to Germany) would pave the way for events that led to the Second World War. The bright lights that shone through the windows of the Empire Pool would have to be blacked out, and a new phase of its story began.

 

6.     The Empire Pool at night, 1930s. (From an old book)

 

When war was declared in September 1939, the Government ordered entertainment venues, such as the stadium and Empire Pool, to close, for fear of bombing raids that could kill thousands of spectators. Arthur Elvin wanted to keep his facilities going, both to generate income for his business and pay the wages of his staff, and because he could see the benefit of continuing his events for the morale of the public. He managed to buy 300 gallons of black paint, and got his workmen to paint over all 56,000 square feet of the Pool’s glass roof! Within a month, he was allowed to hold events again, although with a reduced number of spectators.

 

Regular greyhound racing meetings resumed at the stadium, but indoor events were less frequent, and often involved teams from the services, raising money for charities. In May 1940, both Wembley venues became temporary dispersal camps for British soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk, then for refugees from Belgium, Holland and France, fleeing from the German occupation of their countries, before they too could be found accommodation elsewhere.

 

7.     Civilians being evacuated from Gibraltar in 1940. (Image from the internet)

 

The Empire Pool had now been requisitioned by the Government, and stayed that way until October 1944. In July 1940 they decided that all civilians, apart from those already doing essential work for the British armed services, should be evacuated from Gibraltar, which would become a vital strategic military base at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Around 10,000 people were shipped to London, and for many their home for the next few months would be a room made of wooden partitions in the Empire Pool, with meals provided by its restaurant.

 

Elvin continued to manage the building, and allowed anyone in uniform to skate on the ice rink for free. He also worked with the Central Physical Training Council, so that they could use the arena to hold several mass PT sessions there each week, to help keep Wembley residents fit during the war.

 

8.     Programme for a Victory Gala at the Empire Pool in 1946. (Courtesy of Geoff Lane)

 

In 1946, events at the Empire Pool gradually returned to normal, including a Victory Gala (again in aid of a charity) and a Victory Day circus for children to mark the first anniversary of the end of the war. The ice rink also welcomed back its regular ice hockey matches, with some new recruits for Wembley’s teams.

 

9.     A Wembley Monarchs programme and photo of three new players. (Images from the internet)

 

By 1947, Arthur Elvin had offered Wembley’s facilities so that London could stage the 1948 Olympic Games. In order promote public interest in the forthcoming multi-sports competitions, the British Olympic Association staged an international competition at the Empire Pool in July 1947.

 

 

 10.  Programme for the July 1947 International Sports Contest. (Image from the internet)

 

A year later, it was time for “the real thing”, with the opening ceremony of the XIVth Olympiad, London 1948, taking place on 29 July 1948. The swimming pool at the Empire Pool was brought back into use, first for the swimming and diving events, and the finals of the water polo competition. Then the Wembley team erected a bridge across the pool, with a boxing ring at the centre of it, for the Olympics boxing matches. Every day saw the Pool’s seats packed with spectators, and the BBC’s new cameras used to broadcast the events (to those in reach of its transmitters, and who were wealthy enough to afford a television set).

 

11.  Olympic swimming at the Empire Pool, August 1948. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

 

12.  Olympic boxing at the Empire Pool, August 1948. (Source: Brent Archives)

 

The 1948 Olympic Games were the last time that the swimming pool here was ever used. From then onwards the Empire Pool would become just an indoor arena – but not just for sports! I look forward to sharing the next part of its story with you, in words and pictures, next weekend.

 

Philip Grant.