Earls Court Exhibition Centre

Earls Court Exhibition Centre stood in west London where two boroughs meet, its vast halls straddling Kensington and Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham. Built between 1935 and 1937 by American architect C. Howard Crane, it replaced earlier showgrounds opened in 1887 by Leeds entrepreneur John R. Whitley. Whitley’s Empire of India Exhibition in 1895 brought the Great Wheel and Empress Hall, a 6,000-seat theatre. The site once hosted Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West for Queen Victoria and later became London’s leading exhibition venue. Two Underground stations served the centre, one adapted with a tunnel for show visitors and a link to Heathrow Airport. The centre generated £2 billion for the economy at its peak and hosted events from the Royal Tournament to the Brit Awards. It staged the 1948 and 2012 Olympic Games, the London Boat Show, Crufts and large-scale opera productions. Earls Court One opened in 1937 with an internal pool holding 2¼ million gallons of water, filled and emptied over eight nights to avoid straining local services. A 750-tonne retractable floor covered the pool when not in use. Earls Court Two, opened by Diana, Princess of Wales in 1991, added 17,000 square metres of column-free space. Inside, visitors found vast halls filled with trade shows and concerts, while the pool became a feature of the Ideal Home Show. The tube station’s Warwick Road entrance led directly to the exhibition floors. The site now lies empty after demolition in 2017, awaiting a new development of urban villages.