Somewhere beneath the pitch of England’s national stadium in Wembley, London, lie the foundations of what could have been the city’s tallest building. Inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Great Tower of London was poised to surpass it in height and reach almost 1,200 feet.
Instead, it never went past the first construction stage, which came to be known as the “London Stump.” It was demolished almost 120 years ago, leaving behind an unfulfilled dream and large concrete foundations that were rediscovered in 2002, when the current stadium was built to replace an older one.
So what went wrong?
The tower was the brainchild of Edward Watkin, a British politician and railway tycoon whose previous endeavors included a failed attempt to build a tunnel under the English Channel, more than 100 years before the current Eurotunnel began construction.