Watkin's Tower
Watkin's Tower, also known as the Wembley Tower or the British Eiffel Tower, is one of the most extraordinary examples of Victorian ambition and spectacular failure in British architectural history. Located on what is now the site of Wembley Stadium in the London Borough of Brent, this structure was conceived as a rival to the Eiffel Tower in Paris — a grand iron lattice tower that would soar higher than any man-made structure in the world and draw tourists from across the globe to the north London suburbs. Though it never came close to completion, the story of this tower encapsulates the boundless confidence, entrepreneurial daring, and occasional hubris of the Victorian era.
The project was the brainchild of Sir Edward Watkin, a powerful and enormously influential Victorian railway magnate who sat as a Member of Parliament and presided over several railway companies simultaneously, including the Metropolitan Railway, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, and the South Eastern Railway. Watkin had an almost pathological enthusiasm for grand schemes, and his most audacious was a proposed tunnel beneath the English Channel — another project that never reached completion in his lifetime. When the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889 to worldwide acclaim, Watkin was inspired to build something even taller on land he owned adjacent to his Metropolitan Railway line at Wembley Park. He organised a public competition in 1890 for the tower's design, attracting dozens of wildly imaginative entries including proposals featuring Turkish baths, astronomical observatories, and dancing floors at vertiginous heights.
The winning design was selected from a shortlist of eight finalists and construction began in 1894. The tower was planned to rise to approximately 1,200 feet — taller than the Eiffel Tower — in multiple tapering iron stages. Watkin developed the surrounding land as a leisure park called Wembley Park, which he hoped would be served by his Metropolitan Railway and attract the masses seeking recreation and spectacle. He built a sports ground, ornamental gardens, a bandstand, and other amusements. The Metropolitan Railway extended its line to serve the site, and a station called Wembley Park was opened in 1894 — the very same station that still serves visitors to Wembley Stadium today.
Construction, however, quickly ran into catastrophic difficulties. Funding was chronically insufficient, the ground proved far less stable than anticipated, and the contractors brought in to build the foundations discovered that the marshy London clay of the area was unsuitable for the immense loads the tower would impose. The first stage of the structure reached only about 150 feet before the work ground to a halt. The tower stood incomplete, lopsided, and structurally questionable, earning the sardonic nickname "the Watkin Folly" from locals and the press. Sir Edward Watkin suffered a stroke in 1894 and retired from public life, and without his driving personality and influence, the project lost what little momentum remained.
The incomplete tower became a melancholy curiosity. The leisure park around it continued to operate for a time, but the presence of a rusting, unfinished iron skeleton at its heart hardly inspired confidence. Visitors came partly out of curiosity to see the great failed ambition looming over the Middlesex countryside. The structure was never safe enough to open to the public as a viewing platform in any meaningful way, and it began to subside unevenly. By 1902 the decision was taken to demolish it, and the work of dismantling the first and only completed stage was carried out between 1904 and 1907. The iron was sold for scrap. The cleared ground was left more or less derelict until the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 transformed the entire area, and the original Wembley Stadium — the famous "Twin Towers" stadium — was built partly on the filled and stabilised ground where Watkin's Tower had stood.
The coordinates today sit within the broader Wembley Stadium complex, now dominated by the magnificent arch of the new Wembley Stadium completed in 2007. There is no physical remnant of the tower visible above ground. The site is entirely subsumed within one of Britain's great sporting venues, and most of the thousands of people who pass through Wembley Park station or attend matches and concerts at the stadium have no idea that somewhere beneath their feet, or close to where they stand, lay the failed foundations of Victorian England's most spectacular architectural folly. A small amount of historical interpretation exists in the area, and local heritage enthusiasts have campaigned for better commemoration of this remarkable story.
For visitors interested in the history rather than a sporting event, the area rewards exploration. The Wembley Park development zone surrounding the stadium has been substantially rebuilt in recent years and now contains the London Designer Outlet, restaurants, bars, and public art installations, some of which touch on the area's history. The Olympic Way — the famous ceremonial boulevard leading to the stadium — is lined with sculptures and provides a dramatic approach. The Wembley Stadium tour, when available, gives access to parts of the stadium interior. For those specifically seeking the ghost of Watkin's Tower, the best approach is simply to stand in the open area north or northwest of the stadium and imagine the marshy Victorian meadow and its forlorn iron skeleton rising improbably above the suburban landscape.
Getting to the site is extremely easy. Wembley Park station on the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines of the London Underground is directly adjacent, and Wembley Central station on the Bakerloo line and the London Overground is a short walk away. Wembley Stadium station on the Chiltern Railways and London Overground network is also nearby. The postcode HA9 0QB covers the stadium and its immediate surrounds. The best time to visit, if the purpose is quiet reflection and historical imagination rather than a live event, is on a weekday when the area is far less crowded and one can wander the public spaces freely. Access to the open areas around the stadium is unrestricted, though the stadium interior requires a ticket or tour booking.
One of the most fascinating footnotes to the tower's story is that the structural problems with its foundations were so severe that when the British Empire Exhibition organisers came to develop the site in the early 1920s, they had to undertake significant remedial work to make the ground usable. There is a pleasing irony in the fact that the ground which could not support Watkin's soaring iron vanity project now bears the weight of one of the world's most celebrated football stadiums, with its own iconic 133-metre arch — a modern feat of engineering that in its own way echoes, and surpasses, everything the Victorian dreamer had in mind.