Among the ruins of Wembley Stadium, London, are the foundations of what may have been the city’s highest structure. The Great Tower of London, modeled after Paris’s Eiffel Tower, was set to soar over 1,200 feet above the city.

Instead, the “London Stump” never made it through the first building phase. An unrealized desire and enormous concrete foundations were uncovered in 2002 when the new stadium was erected to replace an earlier one after it was dismantled about 120 years ago.

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Edward Watkin, a British politician and railway entrepreneur, was the driving force behind the building of the tower, which he had previously attempted to build a tunnel beneath the English Channel more than a century earlier.

Larger is always better.

According to Historic England inspector and Victorian architectural specialist Christopher Costelloe, “Watkin was a natural entrepreneur and he enjoyed big ideas — the larger the better.” As one observer noted, “I believe his ideas were frequently pursued before he considered whether or not they were feasible or financially viable.”

Construction expenditures of the Eiffel Tower were swiftly recouped once it debuted in 1889 as a famous tourist attraction.

For his Metropolitan Railway (which would eventually become the Metropolitan line on the London Underground), Watkin was also searching for methods to attract more passengers.

It was hoped that Wembley would become “the Disneyland of its day,” or the successor to the early 19th-century leisure parks like Battersea Park in London or Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen,” says Costelloe, a historian of London’s railways.

The best way to entice Londoners to use the train is with a tower higher than the Eiffel Tower.

On patriotic reasons, Eiffel turned down Watkin’s request for him to design it himself. As a fallback, he decided to enter a design competition throughout the world and offer the winner a cash reward of 500 guineas ($80,000 today).

A total of 68 submissions were made, although not all of them were plausible.

a 2,000-foot-tall structure with a railroad track snaking halfway up the side was planned There were sky gardens, museums, galleries, and even a replica of the Great Pyramid at the summit of another “aerial community.”

Most, however, resembled the Eiffel Tower, and London architects Stewart, McLaren, and Dunn’s submission was chosen as the winner by Watkin.

It was a slimmer replica of the Eiffel Tower that won the competition.” According to Costelloe, “It was quite similar in its general look, but the structure was a little bit skinnier.” This skyscraper was also around 175 feet higher than its Parisian cousin, which was the world’s highest structure at the time.

London’s tower would be “far more expansive” than Paris’ Eiffel Tower and have “restaurants, theaters, stores, Turkish baths, promenades and a variety of other attractions,” all accessible through an electric elevator that had just been invented at the time in 1890. The “purity of air” at such a “immense height” would allow for astronomical observations to be made from an observation deck.

To save money, a scaled-down version of the design was unveiled, with the original eight legs reduced to four, the same number of legs as the Eiffel Tower.

The first stage of construction, which was 150 feet tall, started in 1892 and was completed three years later.

This was a year after Wembley Park’s opening, but the tower had a long way to go before it could be considered a success.

This structure was sinking even before they got to the first stage of the renovation. However, they were aware that constructing it much higher would put too much pressure on their legs and, as Costelloe notes, “they knew they’d have significant issues if they went on building it.”

The skyscraper was doomed even though it was available to the public and had elevators constructed.

In Costelloe’s view, one of the primary issues was that Watkin died in 1901. His death left behind a cost-benefit analysis of the project, which had been the motivating factor behind it. It wasn’t nearly as high as the Eiffel Tower’s vantage point, and the surrounding region wasn’t extremely developed or impressive, so people could only go up to the first tier.

A lack of tourists meant that the project could not be completed.

The tower was shut down a year after Watkin’s death because it was deemed hazardous. It was blown up a short time later using explosives. However, as an industrial and residential London suburb, the region around Wembley continued to thrive.

The first Wembley Stadium was built in 1923 on the location of the tower, which had been demolished in 1911. When the tower was demolished to make space for the modern Wembley Stadium, efforts to lower the new field level revealed the tower’s foundations. A bar in the neighborhood named “Watkin’s Folly” was a late reminder of the doomed tower (it closed permanently in 2019).

Watkin’s Tower would still be London’s highest structure today, exceeding The Shard skyscraper by over 160 feet. Would it, however, be as well-known as, say, the Eiffel Tower? “It would still have been a very massive edifice on the skyline, but viewable only in specific viewpoints,” adds Costelloe.

In Paris, the Eiffel Tower has a dominant emphasis since it is located in the city’s core.