Earls Court hid a giant pool under its exhibition floor
Beneath the main hall of London's Earls Court lay a basin 60 metres long and 30 wide. Filling it took four days and some 2.25 million gallons of water, pumped only at night to spare local supplies, and a 750-tonne floor in three sections dropped away on hydraulic rams to reveal it for boat shows.
Before any of that, the site was farmland, then an awkward triangle of waste ground boxed in by railway lines. In 1887 the Leeds entrepreneur John Robinson Whitley turned it into a showground, opening with Buffalo Bill Cody's American show, which Queen Victoria came to see. Whitley made no money, but he set the site's future. The impresario Imre Kiralfy added a great Ferris wheel for an Empire of India exhibition in 1895 and a 6,000-seat hall next door. During the First World War the grounds became a government camp for more than 100,000 Belgian refugees.
New owners bought the land in 1935, aiming for Europe's largest building by volume and a rival to nearby Olympia. The American theatre architect C. Howard Crane designed an art moderne hall with over 40,000 square metres across two floors; it ran late and over budget, finally costing 1.5 million pounds, and opened on 1 September 1937 with a chocolate and confectionery show. A second hall, Earls Court Two, built over railway tracks for 100 million pounds with a column-free floor, was opened by Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1991 to compete with Birmingham's NEC.
For decades this was Britain's leading exhibition venue, home to the Motor Show, the Ideal Home Show, the Brit Awards until 2010, and from 1950 to 1999 the Royal Tournament military tattoo, when troops camped on site for two months. The London Boat Show used the pool from 1960 to 2003. The venue also hosted events at the 1948 and 2012 Olympics.
Attendance fell, and after a 2008 sale the developers secured immunity from heritage listing. The centre closed on 13 December 2014, with a final concert by Bombay Bicycle Club, and demolition was completed in 2017. Plans for new neighbourhoods were meant to run to 2033, but as of 2025 the site remained derelict.
Source: Earls Court Exhibition Centre
