The Hippodrome Casino is currently the
largest casino in the United Kingdom and, having just opened on 13th July 2012,
it is one of the newest.
The casino's website (visit
link) tells us:
"This iconic London landmark is entering a new chapter,
one which will once again see it become London’s foremost entertainment venue.
With the high energy Heliot restaurant and lounge, five bars, an intimate
performance space, plus all of the very best traditional and electronic casino
games from around the world, The Hippodrome Casino will redefine our
entertainment landscape."
The website (visit
link) also tells us what facilities are available for the
gambler:
"With three gaming floors, all offering a wide range of
games, The Hippodrome Casino is a great venue for both seasoned gamblers and
casino novices alike. For those who know what they're talking about, the casino
has: 20 slot machines 5 Tombola Roulette machines 51 Organic terminals featuring
Roulette, Baccarat, Sic bo and Craps Novo 2 terminals allowing you to play live
auto roulette and Baccarat.15 Roulette tables 8 Baccarat tables 13 Card tables
Minimum stakes - £2 on Roulette, £10 on Blackjack."
The Guardian newspaper's website (visit
link) advises of the experience of 'being there':
"In the eaves of the Hippodrome,
whence the midgets once dangled and the one-legged cyclist strung his trapeze,
there are now tables and tables of gambler's baize. The gaming systems always
look so erudite from a distance, until you remember the simplicity. Just choose
a thing, put money on it, wham, your money has gone, choose again. I'd forgotten
how exciting it was.
In the basement where once were watertanks for the
elephants, there is more gambling – you sit at a machine and play touch-screen
roulette against an automated table in the corner. It looked more joyless and
functional than the tables upstairs, but only because I wasn't
playing.
There is table gambling and machine gambling,
transaction gambling and premium gambling. And in between, a cabaret, a smoking
terrace, some fish fingers made of lobster for £19: I was about to say that the
Hippodrome has come a long way since its turn-of-the-last-century origins, but
actually I'd say it was much closer to the way it was in 1900, now, than it was
last time I saw it in 1990, a strobe-lit sweatbox with a false
ceiling.
Vast, ugly but effective chandeliers now fill the
atrium, the atmosphere is alive with the exhilaration of addictive
personalities, and everywhere you look, there's something to
see.
"It feels like the Titanic," said Christian, who used to
be an epic gambler but is no longer.
"Do you mean mindless opulence, lavished upon people who
are oblivious to impending disaster?"
"No, I just mean there are lots of really big
rooms."
A double-dip recession seems a rum time to open a
delinquents' playground, but Simon Thomas, who co-owns it with his father,
Jimmy, disagrees: "The recession has worked very well for us. The building was
better because contractors are hungry; the competing casinos weren't doing well,
so getting staff was easier; and London is not in recession. London is
heaving."
Up to 240,000 people walk past the door every week. 40
million a year pass underneath it on the tube. It's like what they say about
rats. You're never more than a few feet from a person who's gone past the
Hippodrome.
The thing that will make it work, if it does, won't be
the footfall so much as the fact that all it's a new kind of casino. Even though
the curious rules of the 1968 Gambling Act were largely scotched by the last
government, nobody has yet torn up the old image of a casino that those rules
created.
It used to be a niche, intimidating experience – you had
to be a member, and not an instant one, either, so you couldn't make an ad hoc
decision; you couldn't drink on the gambling floor (in Napoleon's, you used to
have to sit in a sort of glass box, all in a line, watching the tables, drinking
in silence); they couldn't advertise, even on the front of the building, so they
tended to be in basements.
It was a hole-in-the-corner affair, and this … if you
were asked to conjure the very opposite of a hole in a corner, this is what you
would build.
As much as I hate to be vulgar, I had to ask: how much
money is Thomas expecting people to drop when they come in here?
"They can spend anything from zero to hundreds of
pounds. It's not for me to tell people how much to spend. They might just want
to come in for a drink." Proprietors have to say that, don't they? But one of
his other ventures is that giant bingo hall in Cricklewood, so he has form in
providing an avenue for people to waste money in not necessarily huge
amounts.
The interiors are not Vegas-ey; it's rather muted, and
there's a look of studied reassurance that puts me in mind of an airport lounge.
However, it doesn't lack personality. There's a lot of original plasterwork and
the walls are discreetly papered with the flyers from the building's
entertainment history.
Diana Miller, who was in the chorus of Razzle Dazzle
here in the early 1970s, peels back a curtain and points to a faded picture of
feather-clad dancers descending stairs. "There I am, second from the
back."
The peculiar economics of the casino – where people
spend so much on a cheap thing that all kinds of expensive things can be thrown
in for free – have yielded a cabaret: this week, Tony Christie. He has a
nine-strong backing band, and a proper silver-screen voice, and it's all so
impressive that it's a bit surreal.
"Back in 1971," he begins, "I had a record at No 2 in
the charts. And my wife was two weeks overdue, and she said: 'I'm not having
this baby until you go to number 1.' It didn't. But she had the baby anyway."
You don't get chat like that off Snow Patrol.
It's open 24 hours a day, every day except Christmas. It
is rumoured to have cost £40m. It's a sort of magnetic lunacy; I can't see it
failing. It's too big to fail."