The engineer J. J. Webster drew the plans, the contractor George Wimpey poured the concrete, and King Edward VII opened the doors on 27 April 1908. The whole project had cost sixty thousand pounds. Inside ran a track of three laps to the mile; outside curled a sixty-six-yard cycle track. The infield, dug out and lined, held a hundred-metre swimming pool for the Olympic aquatics. Athletes shot arrows here, wrestlers grappled here, and on 26 October Australia met Great Britain in an Olympic rugby union final. Everything was new and almost nothing followed precedent. The Games had never before assembled themselves around a single arena like this. Watching the spectators stream in across the wooden exhibition grounds - the entire Franco-British showpiece had been painted brilliant white, giving the area its name - must have felt like a glimpse of a different century arriving early.

What followed the Olympic flame at White City was not more athletics, but dogs. In 1926 the Greyhound Racing Association took over the property, grassed the running surface, and discovered they had stumbled onto a goldmine. The English Greyhound Derby was held here from 1927 onward, and at the 1939 final, ninety-two thousand people pushed through the turnstiles - a number that still seems impossible to imagine for a sport that has since faded from British life. Between bets, the stadium served as everything else: speedway motorcycles in 1928, boxing matches that drew ninety thousand for the second Len Harvey-Jack Petersen fight in 1934, even a London rugby league experiment that produced the precursor to today's London Broncos. When Wembley refused to cancel its greyhound nights for the 1966 World Cup, the match between Uruguay and France ended up here instead - 45,662 fans watching football where dogs usually chased a mechanical hare.

Some of the fastest moments in British athletics history happened on this track. In 1954, in a match against the Soviet Union, Christopher Chataway ran the 5000 metres against Vladimir Kuts and broke the world record - Kuts beating Chataway broke it again two weeks later, but for those few days a Briton held it. Three years on, Derek Ibbotson took the mile world record here. The Amateur Athletic Association Championships used the place from 1932 to 1970, including the 1934 British Empire Games. Queens Park Rangers played here twice, in spells separated by three decades, before settling for good at Loftus Road. Anyone who tells you London's relationship with sport began at Wembley is missing the chapter where almost everything important happened first at White City.

Not every memory is golden. On 26 May 1974, eight hundred people were injured in a crush at the front of the stage during a David Cassidy concert. Thirty went to hospital. Bernadette Whelan, fourteen years old, died four days later from her injuries. A stadium designed for ninety thousand cheerful punters could become dangerous in a different kind of crowd, and the rules of how to manage standing arenas in the rock-and-roll era had not yet caught up with the music. Today the moment reads as a warning that the country would not fully heed until Hillsborough fifteen years later. Bernadette's family carried the loss home to a London that mostly remembered the stadium for laughter.

The greyhounds ran their last derby on 23 June 1984, and by 1985 the wrecking balls had arrived. The BBC built its White City complex on the site, and in our own decade that has given way to White City Place - offices, restaurants, and a public plaza. The Pogues wrote a song about the demolition for their 1989 album Peace and Love. The marathon marker remains. Somewhere beneath the polished paving, the ghost of a swimming pool sits in the original infield, and the curve of the running track is preserved in the geometry of the new development if you know where to look. Stadiums are not eternal, but the things that happened inside them - the records, the crowds, the standardised marathon - become part of the world's furniture.