There’s a new table game in town and it’s called ‘regeneration’. Stephen McDowell looks at one upside of gambling reform and says ‘Bollocks’ to the hysterical doom-sayers
The last time Felixstowe enjoyed a boom, holidaying families fought the seagulls off their fish and chips, spent pennies in the amusement arcades and sent saucy postcards to their neighbours.
These were the halcyon days when knotted hankies and string vests were couture de jour, prawn cocktails the height of sophistication and only the well-heeled holidayed abroad.
These days even the gulls look glum in Felixstowe. Like scores of similar towns, the once glorious sea-front is as obsolete as the tea room doylies, the arcades filled with tatty grab-a-toy and penny-drop machines that are as amusing as the punch in the eye.
You’re more likely to find empty cider bottles and soiled condoms on the beach than a jolly red-faced bather in jellies. Its famous pier, closed years back for safety reasons, points forlornly into the sea as a monument to its glory days. The gravy train to Prosperity left the station a generation ago and isn’t coming back.
In short, Felixstowe, now more famous for being the biggest container port in Europe, is a place best viewed in black and white.
If the Daily Mail and its doom-saying acolytes are to be believed, Felixstowe would be near the top of the list of the most ‘vulnerable’ in terms of those most likely to become addicted to gambling. Casinos, they say, and all that comes with them, would reduce such examples of faded Edwardian gentility, to miserable ghost towns.
Yet, liberalisation of gaming laws could bring back colour in the form of tourist dosh to these towns, which seem to have pretty much one thing in common: they’re run-down, shy of jobs and amenities and need a shot in the arm. Or head.
Which is why the likes of Felixstowe, Scarborough, Clacton, Skegness and Torquay are considering the casino road back to prosperity. Ports have good roads, you see, and the powers-that-be in these towns believe people with a desire for a night out on the flutter will come from miles around instead of going somewhere else.
Indeed, £3.2m worth of work has already begun regenerating the town’s shabby 1930s bingo hall cum cinema into a smart entertainment and leisure complex. In later phases Palatial Leisure intends to build a 52-room hotel and casino. In the context of the much-hyped £1.3bn Caesars Palace/Quintain deal, it’s piffling; but for towns like Felixstowe, £3.2m isn’t the kind of money you’d casually slap on a yankee.
Financial lifeline
Andy Smith, chair of the town’s planning authority, admits residents did object to the ‘C-word’. Given the site already has a bingo hall, though, the developer doesn’t need planning permission for a casino – just a licence. It’s one of three such applications up for consideration, all involving serious investment in regenerating faded, tatty properties which have for years housed slowly strangulating businesses.
‘We say it has huge potential for regenerating Felixstowe,’ says Smith. ‘In principle, we are all desperate to see some tourist trade in Felixstowe and whether or not it takes a casino to do that we’ll see.’
There’s something of a three-way split in terms of the types of places applying for casinos: the Felixstowes and then a split between sports venues and projects fitting neatly into ongoing urban regeneration. But on the face of it, it would seem sports stadia of whatever flavour are holding the nuts hand when it comes to potential homes for a casino. Football grounds are empty, mostly, six days a week and for three months of the summer, and racecourses have only a few key meetings a year. For perpetually skint rugby and cricket stadia, the same but more so, and all have dedicated, sports-loving fans who consider these venues second-only to their own homes, not to mention vital existing facilities like parking and access.
Ascot Racecourse, for example, rejected the idea but Wolverhampton for certain, and perhaps eventually Windsor, are among racecourses in the Arena Leisure stable earmarked for casinos. Surrey Cricket Club, by way of another example, decided their winter months were well covered by a conference and banqueting business and in any case The Oval, being as the landlord is the Duchy of Cornwall, presented a different series of issues.
Both valid reasons, of course, but perhaps one for the backburner when placed against the money that will fall into the hands of hard-up football clubs.
‘Super-casinos’ such as Wembley’s has formed the real heat in the furore created over the Gambling Bill. But these are only a handful. The latest, a joint venture between Caesars Palace and developers Quintain, will put a monster 70,000 sq ft gaming space (1,200 slots and 110 tables) beneath a nine-storey 400-room hotel, along with a host of other leisure activities.
Oddly, the developers’ promises of 1,700 permanent jobs and 88,000sq ft put aside for community facilities in one of London’s most depressed boroughs as well as £4m to improve the local transport infrastructure didn’t make the headlines. Neither did written statements of intent to build affordable housing on the site.
The other biggie is proposed at the grand misadventure that was the Millennium Dome from the unique Sol Kurzner, though the South African boxer-cum-casino owner is behind at least three UK proposals.
But these, while impressive in size, are more offcuts compared with the real meat of the plan to create a series of medium-sized regional casinos. That meat is being happily pursued by a hunting pack of forward-thinking football clubs keen to find new sources of revenue rather than simply hitting fans for more money at the turnstiles.
Newcastle United were the first to announce a deal with MGM Mirage – owners of the world’s largest hotel MGM Grand Las Vegas, as well as the Bellagio, The Mirage, Treasure Island and New York, New York. In it, MGM Mirage takes half of the deal to build a leisure complex containing retail, apartments and a Las Vegas style casino of approximately 100,000 sq ft. Meanwhile, Toon gets bunged £5m.
Las Vegas Sands Inc. is another big player actively engaged in talks with British football clubs to build and run casinos adjoining their premises in deals which, it says, will give the clubs direct financial benefits proportionate to the success of the casinos.
They’ve already signed deals with Glasgow Rangers to put a significant-sized gaming floor next to the Ibrox stadium, with Sheffield United and West Ham to do likewise. In the case of Glasgow, a detailed application is already before planners. Of course, there are the usual ‘bribes’ of promises of cash for regeneration for hopeless urban shitholes.
LVSI is also in ‘talks’ with other football clubs and the Scottish Rugby Union about a deal with the rarely-used Murrayfield stadium in Edinburgh. Rodney Brody, LVSI’s head of UK operations says: ‘Sporting venues, particularly football clubs, are always looking for opportunities to increase their revenue.’ And, hurray, they get ‘additional funding, but also increased regeneration opportunities and local interests.’ Corporatespeak for: ‘We’ll build it and run it, you market it and provide the punters and we all get well.’
Only the punters can decide whether they will be, as the Daily Mail put it, lured by ‘trashy glitter’ and ‘easy money’ or whether they’re intelligent enough to work out for themselves that they can have a fun night out in a part of town where it once was impossible without fear for your safety.
Perhaps William Hill’s Graham Sharpe is right: ‘We’re experiencing the same hysteria as we did before the last relaxation of gaming rules went through about what is effectively a piece of draft legislation.’
