London’s Betting Shops Are Vanishing, But Not Where It Matters Most

London has fewer land-based gambling venues than it did five years ago, but new research suggests that the headline decline masks a more troubling story: the city’s poorest communities are gaining gambling premises while its wealthiest are losing them. An analysis of official licensing records across all 32 London boroughs, published in Public Health in Practice, tracked the number and type of gambling premises each December from 2020 to 2025 and found that the relationship between deprivation and gambling availability grew steadily stronger over the five-year period. The findings arrive at a pivotal moment for British gambling policy, as the government prepares to overhaul legislation that has governed the sector since 2005.

The study, conducted by Jenny Blythe of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as part of a doctoral thesis, drew on the Gambling Commission’s online register of gambling premises, the authoritative record of venues licensed by local authorities under the Gambling Act 2005. Every land-based gambling venue in Great Britain requires such a license, and the legislation contains a statutory “aim to permit” gambling unless an application conflicts with the Act’s licensing objectives: preventing crime and disorder, ensuring gambling is conducted fairly and openly, and protecting children and vulnerable people from harm. Because licensing decisions are made at borough level, the analysis examined whether deprivation at that same level was associated with changes in premises counts.

The raw numbers tell a story of modest contraction. London’s total stock of gambling premises fell from 1,516 in December 2020 to 1,478 in December 2025, a net reduction of 38 venues. Licensed betting offices, the familiar high-street bookmakers, declined by 74 premises, from 1,313 to 1,239. Casinos fell from 36 to 31, and family entertainment centres nearly vanished, dropping from two to a single venue. Yet two categories moved in the opposite direction: adult gaming centres, the arcades packed with slot machines, rose from 127 to 150, while bingo outlets expanded substantially from 38 to 57. Taken together, these figures suggest not a simple shrinkage of land-based gambling but a shift in its composition, with machine-heavy arcades and social bingo venues filling the space vacated by bookmakers.

The deprivation analysis is where the picture sharpens. Using the 2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation, the official baseline measure of relative deprivation in England, Blythe compared the eight most deprived boroughs with the eight least deprived. The most deprived quartile saw its gambling premises increase from 425 to 430 over the study period, while the least deprived quartile fell from 323 to 312. To quantify the widening gap, the study plotted each borough’s total premises count against its deprivation rank and fitted a linear trendline using ordinary least squares regression. The slope of that line, a summary measure of the association between deprivation and gambling availability, rose from 0.1082 in 2020 to 0.1546 in 2025, an increase of roughly 43 percent. In plain terms, the more deprived a borough became in rank, the more gambling premises it tended to host, and that gradient steepened year after year.

Betting shops illustrate the pattern most starkly. Although bookmakers declined across London, the decline was strikingly uneven. In the 25 percent most deprived boroughs, betting shop numbers fell by just 10 venues, from 392 to 382. In the 25 percent least deprived boroughs, they fell by 22, from 289 to 267. The result is a paradox with public health consequences: betting shops are disappearing from the capital, but they are disappearing disproportionately from its affluent neighbourhoods, becoming ever more concentrated in communities already carrying the heaviest burden of deprivation. This directly challenges a commonly cited narrative that falling betting shop numbers, often linked to the 2019 reduction in stakes on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, automatically translate into reduced gambling exposure for the population at large.

The context of the 2019 stake change matters. Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, the electronic machines that once allowed stakes of up to £100 per spin, had their maximum stake cut to £2 in April 2019, prompting the Gambling Commission to predict significant betting shop closures. The pandemic then forced prolonged shutdowns of gambling premises in 2020 and 2021, while the government launched a review of gambling legislation intended to make it “fit for the digital age.” Any of these developments might plausibly have been expected to reduce the physical gambling footprint, particularly in vulnerable communities. Instead, the concentration of premises in deprived boroughs continued to climb throughout the period, suggesting that market forces and licensing decisions were reshaping the geography of gambling in ways that policy interventions had not anticipated.

The expansion of arcades and bingo venues deserves particular scrutiny. Adult gaming centres grew in both deprived and affluent boroughs, rising from 26 to 33 in the most deprived quartile and from 28 to 31 in the least deprived. Bingo premises grew even faster, from eight to 14 in the most deprived boroughs and from four to 11 in the least deprived. Unlike betting shops, bingo did not show a markedly widening deprivation gap, but overall availability increased considerably across the capital. Because gambling harms, which include financial difficulties, relationship breakdown, mental and physical health problems, educational and employment impacts, and criminal activity, are known to fall unequally on people in deprived areas, the growth of machine-based venues in poorer neighbourhoods raises questions about whether the current licensing framework is equipped to protect those most at risk.

The study has limitations that its author acknowledges candidly. The analysis relies on data supplied by local authorities and published by the Gambling Commission, which itself states that it cannot guarantee the completeness or accuracy of its register, a position the paper describes as concerning for a regulator charged with enforcing objectives that include protecting the vulnerable. Changes in reporting practices may also affect comparisons over time, and the analysis was not adjusted for population size, demographic characteristics or geographical area, meaning it cannot determine individual exposure to gambling opportunities. Casinos, which are concentrated in a small number of largely central London boroughs, were excluded from deprivation comparisons because factors such as tourism, entertainment activity and commercial property markets likely shape their locations more strongly than deprivation does.

Even with those caveats, the findings align with a substantial body of evidence showing that gambling availability and gambling harms cluster in disadvantaged communities, and they carry direct policy implications. London is home to roughly 13 percent of Great Britain’s population but contains approximately a quarter of all land-based gambling premises, and the capital is estimated to have some of the highest levels of gambling-related treatment need in England. The UK government has recently announced its intention to remove the “aim to permit” provision from the Gambling Act, a change that would shift the default posture of licensing authorities from allowing gambling unless harm is demonstrated to a more precautionary stance, though no timeframe has been provided. As policymakers weigh that reform, the London data offer a clear warning: the physical gambling environment is not simply shrinking, it is migrating toward the communities least able to absorb its harms, and future gambling policy will need to address the location and concentration of land-based venues, not only the rapidly growing online sector, if it is to meaningfully reduce health inequalities.

Subject of Research: Changes in the number, type and deprivation-related distribution of land-based gambling premises across London boroughs between 2020 and 2025

Article Title: Changes in land-based gambling premises in London, Great Britain, 2020–2025

Article References: Blythe, J. (2026). Changes in land-based gambling premises in London, Great Britain, 2020–2025. Public Health in Practice, 12, Article 100858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100858

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.puhip.2026.100858

Keywords: gambling, public health, London, deprivation, betting shops, adult gaming centres, bingo, Gambling Act 2005, health inequalities, gambling harms, licensing policy, Gambling Commission