page_title: Wembley
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Wembley / History / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: Central Square, Wembley. Currently being redeveloped. It was a 1960s concrete creation which has not stood the test of time.
context_page_description: Wembley is the principal town of the borough of Brent in north west London, England, about 8 miles west-northwest of Charing Cross. Wembley was formed a separate civil parish from 1894 and was incorporated as a municipal borough of Middlesex in 1937. In 1965, the area merged with the Municipal Borough of Willesden to create the London Borough of Brent, and has since formed part of Greater London.
  Wembley is known as the location of Wembley Stadium, the home of the England national football team and the largest stadium by capacity in the UK.
  The town of Wembley also includes the localities of Alperton, North Wembley, Tokyngton, Wembley Park, Sudbury, and partly Preston. The total population of the seven wards that make it up was 102,856 as of 2011.
context_section_description: The village of Wembley grew up on the hill by the clearing with the Harrow Road south of it. Much of the surrounding area remained wooded. In 1547 there were but six houses in Wembley. Though small, it was one of the wealthiest parts of Harrow. At the dissolution of the monasteries in 1543, the manor of Wembley fell to Richard Andrews and Leonard Chamberlain, who sold it to Richard Page, Esq., of Harrow on the Hill, the same year.
  The Page family continued as lords of the manor of Wembley for several centuries and eventually commissioned Humphry Repton (1752–1818) the landscape gardener to design what is now Wembley Park. Wembley Park thus derived its name from Repton's habit of referring to the areas he designed as "parks".
  There was a mill on Wembley Hill by 1673. In 1837, the London and Birmingham Railway (now part of the West Coast Main Line) was opened from London Euston through Wembley to Hemel Hempstead, and completed to Birmingham Curzon Street the following year. The changing names of the local station demonstrated the increasing importance of the 'Wembley' name. 'Sudbury' station opened in 1845, renamed as 'Sudbury and Wembley' in 1882, renamed as 'Wembley for Sudbury' in 1910, renamed as 'Wembley Central' in 1948, at the time of the Olympic Games.
  To modernise the service, a new Watford DC Line was built alongside the main lines and Bakerloo line trains, and electric trains to Broad Street started in 1917. Electric trains to London Euston began running in 1922. Since 1917, there have been six platforms at what is now Wembley Central station. In 1880, the Metropolitan Railway opened its line from Baker Street through the eastern side of Wembley, but only built a station, Wembley Park, in 1894. There are now three physically separate services, the London to Aylesbury Line, the Metropolitan line, and the Jubilee line. Only the latter two services have platforms at Wembley Park station.
  In November 1905, the Great Central Railway (now, in this section, part of the Chiltern Main Line) opened a new route for fast expresses that by-passed the congested Metropolitan Railway tracks. It ran between Neasden Junction, south of Wembley, and Northolt Junction, west of London, where a new joint main line with the Great Western Railway began. Local passenger services from London Marylebone were added from March 1906, when new stations were opened, including 'Wembley Hill', next to what later became the site of Wembley Stadium – the national stadium of English sport – which opened for the FA Cup Final of April 1923, remaining open for 77 years until it closed for reconstruction in October 2000. After a long planning and redevelopment process dogged by a series of funding problems and construction delays, the new stadium finally opened its doors in March 2007.
  Wembley Hill station was renamed 'Wembley Complex' in May 1978, before getting its present name of 'Wembley Stadium' in May 1987.
  The area around the current Wembley Stadium was the location of the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–1925. Until the 2000s, remnants of the many reinforced concrete buildings, including the original Wembley Stadium, remained, but nearly all have now been removed, to make way for redevelopment.
  Wembley, in common with much of northwest London, had an extensive manufacturing industry, but much of it closed in the 1980s. Factories in the area included Glacier Metals (bearings), Wolf Power Tools, Sunbeam Electrical Appliances, Griffin & George (laboratory equipment) and GEC (whose research laboratories, opened in 1923, were one of the first of their type in the United Kingdom).
  The retail centre of Wembley (the High Road and north end of Ealing Road) has suffered from chronic traffic congestion and from the opening of neighbouring purpose-built shopping centres, first Brent Cross in the early 1970s and later the Harrow and Ealing Broadway Shopping Centres. During the 1960s, rebuilding of Wembley Central station, a block of flats, an open-plan shopping plaza, and a car park were constructed on a concrete raft over the railway.
  The shopping plaza su
caption: Central Square under redevelopment in 2006
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