OVO Arena Wembley

OVO Arena Wembley is a 12,500-capacity indoor concert venue in London, distinguished by a Grade II-listed shell built as the Empire Pool for the 1934 British Empire Games. Its concert life began in 1959, yet the building’s earlier purpose still sets the scale: Historic England records a reinforced-concrete roof of three hinged arches spanning 240 feet, a record-setting construction at opening. This is arena scale inside a piece of interwar sports architecture.

A pool becomes a concert arena

Arthur Elvin commissioned the Empire Pool during the early 1930s while seeking an ice-hockey home at Wembley; engineer Sir E. Owen Williams designed the building, completed for the Empire Games in 1934. The original 200-by-60-foot pool carried an ice-skating deck, and the building held aquatic, boxing and other Olympic events in 1948. By 1959, Shirley Bassey had made the first musical appearance recorded by Brent Council; the venue took the Wembley Arena name in 1978. A 14-month, £35m refurbishment closed it in 2005, then returned it in April 2006 with its entrance turned toward Arena Square. Depeche Mode played the public reopening, tying the modern concert room to the 1934 structure. The work also introduced the Square of Fame forecourt. In 2022, it adopted the OVO Arena Wembley name.

The concert room

OVO’s booking is broad by design: touring music shares the calendar with comedy, sport, wrestling, netball, basketball and e-sports. Pop, rock, K-pop and global music provide a useful shorthand for its music bill, while each event determines the floor and seating configuration. For concertgoers, the constants are a 12,500-capacity room, premium seating and lounge options, and the 240-foot roof span overhead. Expect large-room production scale framed by the historic concrete shell.