Mecca Is Down to 41 Bingo Halls, and Still Shrinking

The bingo hall is not what it was. Rank’s own venue list now runs to 41 Mecca clubs across Britain, roughly half the estate the chain ran only a few years ago. A cluster of them were lined up to close around the start of June, and the reaction to one tells you why this is bigger than a line on a balance sheet.

When the Exeter club was marked for closure, the city’s MP wrote to Rank’s chief executive asking him to reconsider. That is not a letter you often see written over a bingo hall. It is a fair measure of what these rooms mean to the people who use them, and of what quietly goes when one shuts for good.

What is closing, and why

The June list is not one struggling corner of the country. Exeter, Taunton, Birkenhead, St Helens and Kingstanding in Birmingham were all lined up to go, and a Sale club had already shut earlier in the year after close to five decades.

Rank’s reasoning runs along the same line each time. The venue no longer makes enough to justify keeping it open. In Exeter that meant a building needing real money spent on it, a new disabled lift and fresh flooring among the bills, set against takings that no longer covered them. Elsewhere it is leases coming to an end, running costs climbing, and in Birkenhead a town centre and car park being redeveloped in a way that strangles passing trade.

This is not a chain in crisis. Rank still turns a profit and the Mecca brand is far from finished. What it is doing is trimming the clubs that no longer wash their face, and Richard Harris, the group’s interim chief executive, has more of those calls ahead. Rank has said further selective closures stay on the table wherever a building needs serious investment or the footfall is thin.

The gaming machines underneath it

There is a reason hall bingo is this exposed, and it isn’t really about the bingo. We looked earlier at how two-thirds of hall revenue now comes from gaming machines rather than the tickets. The dabbing keeps people in the room. The machines pay the rent.

That holds up while the room is full. When footfall slips, the machine take slips with it, and a club that leans on that income tips from marginal to loss-making quickly. So a closure is rarely one bad quarter. It is a building whose maths stopped working, in a model that came to depend on something other than the game on the tickets.

The people a closure actually hits

Numbers on an estate map are one thing. Losing your local is another, and this is where the Exeter letter earns its place.

Steve Race, the city’s Labour MP, called the club a “vital community hub” and warned that closing it would hit loyal customers at risk of isolation, older residents and disabled visitors the hardest. He met the 22 staff who stood to lose their jobs. The Exeter hall had been open since 1963. For a regular who has gone there for years, an afternoon of company as much as a game, “there’s an app” is not much of an answer.

That is the honest cost of these closures, and it is the part no balance sheet records. Hall bingo has always been as much about the room as the prize, the same seats, the tea, the natter between books. When a club shuts, some players travel to the next nearest one, some move to the online game, and some simply stop. The ones hit hardest are the ones least able to follow it onto a screen.

Where the game goes next

The wider pattern is not that bingo is dying. It is that it keeps moving. The audience is drifting from the hall to the screen, and the operators know it, which is why the same groups closing clubs are pushing hard on their apps and their online bingo sites.

Online is where the volume sits now, and it isn’t going backwards. What it does not replace is the room, the noise and the company that made the hall version what it was. For the players still turning up to a local Mecca, the honest read on this summer is plain. The estate is smaller than it was, it will probably get smaller still, and a move to the screen that has been under way for years is close to done.