The High Street Betting Shop - Dying Cultural Institution or Good Riddance?

[TaffyTipster]

Walking through Pontypridd last weekend.

The William Hill where my dad used to take me on Saturday afternoons has been empty for two years. Faded logo still on the window. One of four shops within three streets that are now closed.

My dad brought me in when I was about twelve. Not to bet obviously. Just because it was where he went on Saturdays. I'd stand next to him and watch the racing on the screens and listen to the commentary.

Smelled like carpet and cigarettes and instant coffee. Full of men who knew each other by first name and argued about form guides.

It was a social space as much as a betting space. For a lot of those men it was the reason to leave the house on a Saturday.

That's gone now. The men who were there are at home alone with a phone.

I'm not sure that's better. I'm not sure it's worse. But something specific disappeared and nobody had a funeral for it.

 

[DublinDegen]

different relationship with the shop than taffy...

spent too many hours in them during bad periods...

the one in dublin near where i lived... knew the staff... they knew me... knew my patterns... never once said anything...

the shop enabled things that the online environment also enables but there was something specific about the physical space...

you could be in there for four hours and nobody questioned it... nobody looking over your shoulder... just you and the screens and the slips...

the london one i mentioned before... four hours that should have been spent with a friend... just gone into the shop instead...

but i also remember the good version taffy describes...

cheltenham week... the shop absolutely packed... strangers talking to each other... collective experience of something...

both things are true and i don't know how to hold them simultaneously...

 

[ThePuntingProf]

The first serious bet I ever placed was in a William Hill in Shepherd's Bush in 1993.

The slip was paper. You wrote your selection by hand. The cashier checked it manually and stamped it.

The morning papers were pinned to a board near the entrance. Sporting Life. The Racing Post.

You stood at the counter alongside strangers who were doing the same calculation you were.

There was a specific democracy to it. The retired teacher and the bricklayer and the market trader all standing at the same counter with the same slip doing the same thing.

Margaret refused to go inside. She said it felt like a place where time had stopped.

She was right about that. The shops existed in a slightly different temporal register from ordinary life.

Whether that was a feature or a failure I'm still not certain.

 

[oli_sussex]

Brighton has lost six betting shops in the last five years by my count.

The specific demographic who used them: older men, often retired or unemployed, using the shop as a daytime social infrastructure that doesn't exist elsewhere for them.

The pub has declined. The working men's club has largely gone. The job centre has been moved online.

The betting shop was one of the last physical spaces that was cheap to enter, warm, had screens with sport on, and didn't require you to buy anything to stay.

The loss of the shop isn't only about gambling. It's about the disappearance of a category of social space that served a population with few alternatives.

Whether the shop should have existed in the form it did is a separate question from what fills the gap.

Currently: nothing fills it.

 

[FadeThePublic]

The shop had a specific practical value for certain bet types that online doesn't replicate well.

Cash betting. No transaction trail. Certain types of complex accumulators where you wanted to build the bet across multiple events with a cashier who could check the logic.

The cash element is underappreciated.

For a significant number of people the shop was the only accessible betting infrastructure. No credit card. No bank account compatible with online operators. No smartphone.

The move to online has effectively disenfranchised a segment of the betting population.

Whether disenfranchising people from betting is harm reduction or exclusion depends entirely on your view of the activity.

Both framings are defensible.