London 1948: Olympic venues overview
Austerity was the name of the game at London 1948, as the organisers stuck to a tight budget, making use of existing venues only.
Such was the desire of the Organising Committee to keep costs down at a time of austerity that none of the 29 competition venues was new, and no Olympic Village was built. Some of the venues were made available by their owners free of charge, a reflection of the post-war spirit of collaboration.
Nineteen of them remain in use and continue to cater for high-performance and grassroots/community sportTwo had been used at the 1908 Olympic Games (the Henley Royal Regatta Course and Bisley Rifle Range), while three were used at London 2012: the Empire Stadium, Empire Pool and Empress Hall, which were respectively renamed Wembley Stadium, Wembley Arena and the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre in the years after the 1948 Games. The Exhibition Centre was demolished in 2014.
Of the eight other venues no longer in use, five of them hosted football. One of these, Griffin Park, was closed in 2020 when the resident club, Brentford, moved to a new stadium. It will potentially make way for a housing development, as was the case at Highbury. Formerly the home ground of Arsenal, Highbury’s listed East and West stands have been converted into flats, with their original facades having been refurbished. The site of the Goldstone Ground (Brighton and Hove Albion) is now occupied by the Goldstone Retail Park. White Hart Lane was knocked down in 2017 and replaced by the state-of-the-art Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on the same site in 2019.
The venues still in use include some famous names aside from Wembley, such as Bisley (shooting) and Henley (rowing and canoe). Held on a stretch of the River Thames, the Henley Regatta remains one of the sporting and social events of the year in the United Kingdom and takes place on the Straight Course, which hosted the Olympic rowing and canoe competitions in 1948. The home of the UK’s National Rifle Association since 1890, Bisley is synonymous with shooting, and staged all the sport’s events at the 2002 Commonwealth Games.
One of the venues used at London 1948 was temporary and was dismantled after the Games: the facilities set up in Windsor Great Park for the road cycling competition.