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Now demolished and replaced by Norman Foster’s good, but not great, single arch stadium that is not unlike the Athens Olympic Stadium. The original Wembley stadium was called the Empire Stadium, having been built for the British Empire Exhibition in the 20s. The style was imperial with Art Decoish towers, reminiscent of the quintessential piece of British Empire architecture: Lutyen’s Viceroy palace in New Delhi. As with the Tokyo Olympics, the stadium was not the real architectural star, and like the Munich Olympics, the real star was an engineer – Owen Williams, the engineer for the stadium but both engineer and architect on the superlative, Empire Pool, later called Wembley Arena.
