Manchester Gets UK’s First Super Casino

English comedian Jasper Carrot performed in Las Vegas ages ago and said that there was nothing like that city anywhere in the UK. He said the Brits gambled by eating in restaurants. Much has changed of late, not least of which is the decision by Britain’s Casino Advisory Panel to grant the city the first license to build a “super casino” in the country. Most amusingly, the UK bookies had Manchester as a 16-1 outsider against six other sites.

Stephen Crow, chairman of the independent Casino Advisory Panel, explained the decision, “Manchester has a catchment area for a casino second only to that of London, and it is an area in need of regeneration at least as much as any of the others we observed.” In truth, Manchester is only a short drive from most of the UK compared to London or Glasgow, it has an international airport capable of taking the biggest planes, and it has a few things other than gambling that make it a tourist destination (a couple soccer teams and a decent set of museums and restaurants spring to mind).

The unsuccessful bidders included Blackpool, Glasgow and London. The BBC reported, “Doug Garrett, chief executive of ReBlackpool, the urban regeneration company that worked on the town's bid, said: ‘I’m very disappointed indeed at the outcome, Blackpool’s future was something built around our plan’.” Elsewhere, the BBC said, “Steven Purcell, leader of Glasgow City Council, said: ‘This is clearly a disappointment. Fortunately our strategy for growing Glasgow as a major tourist destination was never solely dependant on winning the casino licence’.” Meanwhile, the failure of the bid to put the super casino by the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, in south east London, left Mayor “Red Ken” Livingston disappointed because, “The opportunity to secure employment opportunities for many hundreds in one of the UK's most deprived areas has been lost.” Still, London has the Olympics to take some of the sting out of this loss.

In addition to the super casino license, several “large” and “small casino” licenses are to be granted. In the former grouping are Great Yarmouth, Hull, Leeds, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, Newham, Solihull and Southampton. The latter category includes Bath and North East Somerset, Dumfries and Galloway, East Lindsey, Luton, Scarborough, Swansea, Torbay and Wolverhampton. The super casino license permits a gambling site with a minimum customer area of 5,000 square meters and up to 1,250 unlimited-jackpot slot machines (Las Vegas has 30 of these). Large casinos will have a minimum area of 1,000 square meters and up to 150 slot machines with a maximum jackpot of £4,000. The small casinos will have a minimum customer area of 750 square meters, up to 80 slot machines and a jackpot of £4,000.

Of course, gambling has always been legal in the UK under certain circumstances. Turf accountants (bookies at the horse track or on the corner of any street) have a long and glorious history. Private clubs have offered roulette and baccarat for years. And in pubs, any game of skill like darts or chess could legally be played for small stakes (the next round). In Manchester, the hope is for 1,200 or so jobs in a part of town that needs them. Stranger things have happened. After all, who would have imagined a small bus stop for soldiers headed to California in World War II would become, thanks to a gangster named Bugsy, the gambling capital of the New World. Or that English restaurants would improve enough in the last quarter century to rob one of Birmingham’s funniest men of a punchline.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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