Wembley Park

A Victorian pleasure garden that became the country's stadium, and is now a town built around it.

Wembley Park was a landscaped estate in Middlesex until the Metropolitan Railway cut through it in the 1890s. Edward Watkin bought the land and turned it into somewhere Londoners went on a day out - a fairground, grounds, an attraction at the middle of it - which is the beginning of everything that has happened here since.

The 1920s did the rest. Metro-land filled the fields around it with houses, the Empire Stadium went up, and the British Empire Exhibition brought several million people out along what is now Olympic Way. The stadium was rebuilt in the 2000s and the arch went up with it; the arena beside it has been a concert hall since the Exhibition's Palace of Arts.

Two Wembley Parks sit on top of each other here. The newer is the walk from the station down Olympic Way to the stadium, and the flats, outlet shops and restaurants put up along it in the last twenty years to serve the walk. The older is most of the ground: the semi-detached streets off Forty Avenue and Forty Lane, which are those 1920s fields built on, and the Chalkhill estate east of them, rebuilt at the turn of the century. Come for what is on at the stadium or the arena; Wembley's own high street is half a mile south and is a different thing entirely.