The tale of two towers

England and France competed fiercely for bragging rights in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but no version of France's féted Eiffel Tower ever came to fruition. Not for lack of trying, however, says Martin Fone

- Martin Fone

THE twin towers of Wembley Stadium were an iconic symbol of English football until they were demolished in 2003, but Wembley Park would have boasted an even more impressive structure had the ambitions of railway entrepreneur and Liberal Unionist MP Sir Edward Watkin come to fruition. Irked by the rapturous acclaim that had greeted the opening of the Eiffel Tower, the world’s tallest structure, at the World Fair in 1889, he declared that ‘anything the French can do, the English can do bigger!’ and laid plans to build an even taller tower.

Rather than ape the French and place it in the centre of the metropolis, Watkins chose a 280-acre plot of land that he had bought in the Wembley area, the pièce-de-résistance of a grandiose plan to build a new community connected to London by the Metropolitan Railway, of which he happened to be the chairman. As Sir John Betjeman observed, when telling the story of the suburbs that grew along the Metropolitan line in 1973 television documentary Metro-Land, ‘beyond Neasden there was an unimportant hamlet where for years the Metropolitan didn’t stop. Wembley. Slushy fields and grass farms. Then out of the mist arose Sir Edward Watkin’s dream: an Eiffel Tower for London’. The obvious designer, Gustave Eiffel, refused the commission, remarking that, if he did it, his countrymen ‘would not think me so good a Frenchman as I hope I am’. Undaunted, Watkin launched a competition in 1890 to solicit designs for the tower, which had to be at least 1,200ft tall, topping the Eiffel Tower by some 200ft. A prize of 500 guineas was offered to the winning design.