History

Wembley first came into existence as a destination with the expansion of the railways in the late 19th Century. Wembley Park was specifically created at this time as a leisure attraction that would encourage people to travel on the new transport network, and people soon started to use the new Wembley Park Station to travel to Saturday football matches played in the park, thereby starting the long tradition of the sport at Wembley.

In the 1924 and 1925 Wembley hosted the British Empire Exhibition, and this was the point at which the original Stadium and Arena came into being. What is now known as Wembley Arena was then the Empire Pool, and this still exists beneath the auditorium today. The British Empire Exhibition featured 56 of the 58 countries that were in the Commonwealth at the time and attracted a staggering 27 million visitors.

When the Exhibition closed, the area began to experience a slow decline. The imposing buildings created for the event, which were never designed to be permanent, proved too expensive to demolish and began to fall into disrepair.

Efforts were made to revitalise the area around Wembley Central Station, on the southern boundary of what is now Wembley City, in the 1960s, but these proved to have little in terms of longevity.

The vision for Wembley City began to emerge in 2002 when Quintain bought Wembley (London) Ltd, along with 44 acres of land around the proposed site of the new Wembley Stadium.  In 2004, as part of the Company’s programme to establish a viable and sustainable local economy around Lord Foster’s iconic Stadium, Quintain won outline planning consent for 5.3 million square feet of development, comprising homes, shops, offices and leisure facilities.

In 2005, work began on the new scheme with the reorientation of Wembley Arena to face the new Stadium across a specially constructed square, thereby creating a new cohesive heart for the subsequent development. The extensively renovated Arena was re-opened in 2007 with a sell out crowd and in 2010 BarclayCard was named as its new title sponsor.