© MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Afua Hirsch
Wembley, in north London, is one of the capital’s most diverse and congested corners; a cacophony of intersecting shopping malls, ethnic minority grocery stores, tube lines, traffic gridlock and 24-hour commuters. But at the turn of the 20th century, it was just a quiet civil parish on the edge of the countryside. Things changed, irreversibly, here in 1922, when construction begun on a project unlike any other—the 56 nation, 216-acre, £12m British Empire Exhibition, the “biggest fair Britain had ever known.”