Wembley Gates Bound For Chile

The royal tunnel gates from the original Wembley Stadium are on their way to Chile, having been bought for £5,785.

The successful bidder at an auction run by Sotheby’s in November 2011 was Charles Brooking’s Architectural Museum Trust, a charity institution.

Also under the hammer were another eight lots that included a round window from the iconic twin towers and lights from the royal box.

The original Wembley venue, which opened in 1923, closed in 2000 and demolition began a couple of years later.
The iconic twin towers were knocked down and the gates were days away from the same fate.

The Brooking Trust has since stored the gates at London’s Greenwich University. They’re now on their way to Santiago, where the local Museum de la Moda will use them in an exhibition of pieces related to football, tennis and other sports.

The gates were too large for containers so had to be packaged in timber casing, lifted with special equipment and shipped as conventional below-deck cargo, according to Terry Horsnell, a consultant from Anglo Pacific Fine Art.

“A shipment like this only comes four or five times a year,” he said.

Horsnell’s most recent experience of such logistics was shipping a 16-foot high Salvador Dalí statue to Singapore.