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.

 

[SharpEddie47]

American perspective on a specifically British and Irish institution.

Visited shops in London in 2008 and again in 2014. Struck immediately by how different the experience was from anything in the US.

The specificity of the atmosphere. The morning papers. The chalk boards giving way to digital boards but retaining the aesthetic. The commentary culture where regulars would talk through races out loud.

There's nothing equivalent in American sports culture. The sportsbook at a casino approaches it but isn't the same.

The shop was embedded in ordinary high street life in a way American betting facilities never have been.

Whether that embedding was a good thing depends on your view of gambling's proper place in community life.

From the outside it looked like a specific and irreplaceable form of social infrastructure.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

What strikes me from Taffy and Prof's memories is the intergenerational transmission aspect.

The father bringing the child in. Not to bet. Just because that's where you went.

That's how activities become culturally normal. Through ambient exposure during formative experiences.

The shop's decline interrupts that transmission.

Whether the transmission was transmitting something worth transmitting is the question.

If the shop normalized a certain relationship with gambling for generations of working class men in ways that produced harm: good riddance.

If the shop provided community infrastructure for men who had little of it: something real is lost.

These might both be true simultaneously and that's what makes the question uncomfortable.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

I have no cultural reference for this at all.

Reading everyone's descriptions: it sounds like what would happen if a sports bar and a library combined and charged nothing for entry.

The social infrastructure point Oli makes is the one I find most striking as an American.

We have places like this but they're usually commercial in a way that requires spending money to occupy them.

The betting shop as a free warm social space with screens and community.

That's actually filling a gap that exists in a lot of places.

The fact that the price of entry was normalized gambling behavior rather than a coffee order is the difficult part.

 

[TaffyTipster]

Princess describing it clearly from the outside.

The shop was free to enter and warm and social and had sport on and you could stay as long as you wanted.

The price wasn't money to occupy the space.

The price was the normalization of betting as what you do in that space.

Everyone around you is betting. The screens are there for betting. The slips are there for betting.

You can stand and watch if you want. Most people don't.

 

[DublinDegen]

the FOBTs were the specific thing that made the shops genuinely damaging in a way that felt different from horse racing and football...

the fixed odds betting terminals... the roulette and virtual racing machines in the corner...

those machines were designed specifically for the shop environment... high frequency... no breaks between sessions... maximum stake £100 before the regulation...

the racing community and the football betting community in the shops had some culture around it... some knowledge required... some engagement with the actual sport...

the FOBT was just a machine in the corner of a social space designed to extract money at high speed from whoever sat down at it...

the regulation cutting the max stake to £2 was right... probably came ten years too late...

but the machine and the shop culture were different things that shared a floor...

 

[oli_sussex]

Conor's distinction between the FOBT and the shop culture is the one that gets lost in the simplistic versions of this debate.

The regulators and campaigners focused on the FOBT correctly.

The FOBT was a casino product inserted into a high street context. High frequency. High stakes. Designed specifically to maximize revenue extraction from vulnerable users.

The regulation of FOBTs was legitimate and overdue.

But the shop closures that followed the FOBT regulation weren't only closing the machine in the corner.

They were closing the social infrastructure the machine happened to share premises with.

The collateral loss was real even if the primary target was correct.

 

[FadeThePublic]

The FOBT point clarifies something about the good riddance position that I find too blunt as stated.

Good riddance to the FOBT machine. Clearly.

The social function the shop served for specific populations: less clearly.

The harm the shop produced through normalized gambling exposure: real.

The harm the shop prevented by existing as community infrastructure: also real but invisible because the counterfactual doesn't exist.

The men who used the shop as a reason to leave the house on Saturday. Where do they go now.

That question hasn't been asked by anyone involved in the policy.

 

[ThePuntingProf]

The men Fade describes were visible in every shop I used over thirty years.

Some of them were clearly problem gamblers extracting harm from the environment.

Some of them were clearly lonely men extracting community from the environment.

Most of them were both simultaneously.

The shop served pathological and legitimate needs through the same mechanism.

The online environment serves only the pathological need.

It has no mechanism for the community function because it has no physical space in which community can form.

The man who used to go to the shop to argue about the 3:30 at Cheltenham with someone who knew him by name.

He's at home now.

The online platform doesn't know his name and doesn't care about the argument.

 

[TaffyTipster]

The empty William Hill in Pontypridd.

I walked past it again this week.

There's a planning notice on the door. Going to be converted to flats.

The men who were in there on Saturday afternoons for twenty years. Some of them are probably better off. Some of them are definitely worse off.

I don't know which proportion is which.

I don't think anyone does.

 

[CoachTony_Bets]

The not knowing which proportion is which is the honest position and almost nobody takes it.

The harm reduction community says good riddance and means it.

The nostalgia community says something was lost and means it.

Both are describing real things about the same institution.

The institution contained genuine community and genuine harm in the same physical space.

Closing it removed both simultaneously.

Whether that was the right trade is a question that requires knowing what replaced the community function.

Currently: nothing has.

 

[DublinDegen]

going to say something that might seem strange given how much time i spent in shops during bad periods...

i miss them a bit...

not the FOBT... not the way they enabled what i was doing...

but the specific experience of being in a space with strangers who all cared about the same result...

cheltenham week... the shop absolutely full... everyone looking at the same screen... collective sharp intake of breath when a horse falls...

that experience doesn't exist online...

i can be in a forum with a thousand people having a conversation... it's not the same as being in a room with forty people watching the same thing at the same time...

the digital version of community is real... it's just not the same thing...

 

[oli_sussex]

Conor describing the phenomenological difference between physical and digital community.

The forum is genuine.

It's not the same as the room.

Both things are true and neither cancels the other.

 

[SharpEddie47]

Something specific is lost when an institution disappears even if the institution was flawed.

The flaws don't retroactively eliminate the real things the institution provided.

The shop was a flawed institution that served genuine needs imperfectly while producing genuine harm.

That description applies to a lot of institutions that have disappeared and left gaps nobody filled.

The gap doesn't close because the institution was flawed.

It just stays open.

 

[ParlayPrincess_88]

The empty shop with the planning notice for flats.

That's the end of the thread isn't it.

Whatever it was. Whatever it cost. Whatever it provided.

It's going to be flats.