The Empire in miniature 

Miraya McCoy 

My visit to Brent Library Archive last summer, just east of Wembley in North-West London, uncovered boxes of guidebooks and catalogues, paper cuttings, photographs, and maps that reveal the long entanglement of the area with empire. Old and faded images of temples, pagodas, and Mughal arches are, surprisingly, marked ‘Wembley’ – offering a glimpse into a kind of embryonic mirage of contemporary multicultural London. They are remnants of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition –  the imperial Disneyland for which Wembley Stadium, originally ‘Empire Stadium’, and the surrounding site was first built. 

The exhibition was a vast materialisation of the imperial imagination on London’s breezy western uplands, with over 20 pavilions, each built in the style of a colony. Casting minarets and crenulations against grey suburban skies, it aimed to ‘produce in miniature the entire resources of the British empire’, with the intention of invigorating intercolonial trade after World War I. There were 27 million visitors over two seasons – over half the population of the UK at that time. Most arrived on the Metropolitan line, which had been extended to reach Wembley in the 1890s by Edward Watkin, the original owner of the site and, fittingly, an advisor on colonial railways in India, as well as the entrepreneur behind the construction of railways in King Leopold II of Belgium’s Congo.

Throughout the exhibition’s printed materials, spectacular ‘magic’ is firmly underwritten by a violent logic of extraction and exchange, putting on show the colonial dynamics which continue to shape our globalised world. The South Africa Pavilion catalogue, for example, advertises frivolous ‘ostrich and fancy feathers’, pages away from the offer of ‘practical help for the settler’. As well as showcasing colonial produce and industries, and a bonanza of imperial spectacle (countless exotic curious, beauty contests, a life-size butter sculpture of the Prince of Wales, roads named by Rudyard Kipling, elephants, snake-charmers, ‘performers of a hundred mysteries’, and even a reproduction of Tutankhamen’s tomb), the park was home to some of the last human zoos in Britain, where colonial subjects were brought to live and work in mock-villages, on display to the public – a stark reminder of the grotesque carnival of inequality and exploitation from which contemporary Britain has sprung. 

Of these mock-villages, pageants, and parades, one civil servant complained that ‘it is a disgusting and unsatisfactory business bringing more or less unsophisticated natives to this country […] even when they are under military control, the usual results are amongst others, a perceptible increase in the proportion of halfbreed births.’ This quote, scrawled onto a Colonial Office file, is deeply unsettling. And yet, as such a ‘halfbreed’ myself, I find its irony unmistakable given the many types of halfbreed (racial, architectural, culture etc.) that have been spawned by the British imperial project. That such a fear and hatred of racial and cultural miscegenation could have been upheld by a man who was, at the same time, literally involved in the recreation of the colonies in suburban London lays bare the absurdities and cognitive dissonances at the heart of the empire. 

One stark image of this contradiction that I came across in the course of my research was the Pageant of Empire. The exclusion of Indian actors meant that, as The Times put it, ‘Indian scenes must be, in large measures, in European hands’, resulting in enthusiastic performances by volunteers with faces smeared in brown paint. As British Pathé footage of giggling girls enjoying their shawls and sarees shows, this was an act of roleplay that revelled in the very cultural entanglements it sought to disavow.

Coincidentally, a few weeks after my first archive visit, I came back to Wembley to get a saree blouse fitted for my father’s wedding. Nowadays, Wembley is one of the most ethnically diverse areas of London, and walking to the tailor I was struck by how the eclectic, layered architecture of the long-gone exhibition has stretched beyond its original bounds. Full of the mish-mash identities and hybrid spaces that characterise the afterlives of the British empire, Wembley is a microcosm of the ways in which the empire has folded in on itself, challenging the segregated concrete world order for which the exhibition advocated. 

The structure of the Indian Pavilion still stands, stripped of its minarets and domes, and is now the warehouse of Latif House Oriental Rugs Ltd. Down the road, Wembley Central Mosque is housed in an old converted church (originally built by the Imperial Institute architect Edward Collcutt), and within walking distance are two ornate Hindu temples that serve the area’s large South Asian community – one is the largest outside of India. Ealing Road, one of London’s ‘Little Indias’, is lined with early 20th century semi-detached ‘metro-land’ commuter housing – a product of the same expansion into the suburbs that brought the exhibition to Wembley in the first place. Models of these mock Tudor houses were even displayed at the exhibition, and many in the area are still painted with the pastiche beams that became popular at the time, the idea being that there was space for every Englishman to have his own manor in the suburbs. 

If you look closely at a few of these houses now, the central floral motifs of the coloured glass in the bay windows have been replaced with the Hindu Om symbol.  And in many ways, these mock Tudor houses were always deeply entangled with the world beyond Wembley – displaying a confected version of Englishness that is deeply bound up with the imperial project, as evidenced by the number of these striped buildings that are still scattered across the ex-colonies, from India to Sri Lanka to Malaysia and beyond. 

Today, Wembley’s landscape is being reshaped again, led by the US property giant Quintain’s multi-billion-pound project, which has transformed the area around the stadium into a cluster of high-rise rental apartments, unaffordable to most local residents. Activist and Urbanist Nabil Al-Kinani was employed by the project as a development manager before quitting over the renaming of streets and buildings to commemorate the 1924 Empire Exhibition. He has drawn attention to this romanticisation of a history of violence through his ‘Naming Pains’ campaign, which critically examines the imperial nostalgia that is being re-embedded in the area’s urban development. This wave of redevelopment flattens and fabricates history once more, repackaging the past as an aesthetic, and sanitising the contested, layered significances of the space in favour of a marketable, imperial afterglow. It is perhaps a reminder of the inadequacy of small ironies in the face of the larger forces that replace the tangled markers of a still-unravelling history with a violent brand of wilful ignorance. 

Miraya McCoy is the editorial assistant on Bloomsbury’s continental philosophy list, and in her spare time is currently part of a research project on the Indian reformer, Ram Mohan Roy. She’s a Londoner of mixed Malaysian and British heritage, with roots stretching from India and Sri Lanka to Germany, and is fascinated by the unravelling histories of Empire. She holds two degrees in English from Cambridge.