Saw this on Facebook. Reportedly taken at Bolton Wanderers v West Ham United 1923 the very first FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium (2-0) Estimates suggest up to 300,000 attended the game, official attendance was just over 126,000. That walk up Wembley way hasnt changed much.
It's hard to envisage it being in a field at some stage, especially when you see how built up it all is now!
I love old pictures like that. Find them fascinating. Hard to get your head around the fact that those fields will never come back. Think of that every time you see a new development go up!! Call some place Paradise .......... kiss it goodbye. Moving to SW London, I was lucky enough to work at Twickenham for the World Cup 2015. Some of the pics on the walls of the corridors charting the history were amazing. It literally was a cabbage patch in an endless sea of allotments. Fast forward 100+ years it is an outstanding stadium in a VERY built up area: Closer to home, I love the aerial pic of Odsal Stadium and the record Rugby League crowd. With it's position geographically, and it's ease of access, there was always talk in my younger days of Odsal being the "Wembley of the North" but short-sightedness and lack of ambition killed that dead. It could have been, nay should have been, a National Stadium.
There was a series a few years ago charting the evolution of several streets, I think they were mostly or all in London. One of them was a street called Camberwell Grove, a beautiful georgian street created by rich merchants who wanted something more rural but liked the grandeur of townhouses. It's probably about 4 miles from the centre of London where they would have traded. The thing that blew my mind was when they were built (starting in the 1770's) it was a rural tiny village with fields galore and much of the south bank of the Thames was marsh land. The trek to the city on horse drawn carriage would take a few hours. The programme charted the decline of the street where most became squats and the council wanted to raze the street to the ground. Thankfully a group of architects started buying them to save them and started a gentrification. Would have been very sad to have lost such an impressive street so far south of the river. But sadly, things are being lost at far too swift a rate. Both buildings of heritage and land of green.
