Under the Gaming Act 1968, getting into a London casino took patience. A new member had to apply in person at the club and then wait at least 48 hours before playing a single hand.
That rule says a lot about how the law saw gaming in the capital. London’s gaming clubs go back a long way: William Crockford, a former fishmonger, opened his famous club on St James’s Street in the late 1820s, in a building designed by Benjamin and Philip Wyatt.
For much of the period since, though, commercial gaming has been something Parliament tried to contain rather than encourage.
From loophole to licence
The Gaming Act 1845 made gambling debts unenforceable in the courts, and common gaming houses stayed illegal for more than a century after it. The Betting and Gaming Act 1960 was meant to allow small, fair games among members. It required the chances to be equally favourable to all players, but it let clubs charge a fixed fee to take part, and a new kind of gaming club grew up around that gap.
By 1968 the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, was telling the Commons that the 1960 Act had “precipitated the very evil it was meant to prevent”, and that the big-charging clubs were “mostly in the West End of London”. The Gaming Act that followed created the Gaming Board for Great Britain, with a duty “to keep under review the extent and character of gaming in Great Britain”, and brought in the membership rules and the 48-hour wait.
The club years
For the next four decades, a London casino was a members’ club. Joining meant paperwork and a delay, and the evening itself had a set shape: a dress code, often dinner, and tables run by trained croupiers. Callaghan had promised the Commons that “all gaming operatives, managers and supervisors will be individually certified by the Board”, and the 1968 Act required a Gaming Board certificate for anyone paid to handle the cards, chips or other apparatus in a licensed club.
The wait was cut to 24 hours in April 1997, and from 1999 people could apply for membership by post, though they still had to wait a day before playing. It disappeared altogether on 1 September 2007, when the Gambling Act 2005 replaced the 1968 regime, the Gambling Commission took over from the Gaming Board, and casinos no longer had to operate as clubs. The same Act also set out how gambling by people who were not on an operator’s premises, including over the internet, would be regulated.
Moving online
Most of the casino play that moved to the internet was never at a table. In the year to March 2026, online casino games in Britain generated £5.7bn in gross gambling yield, and £4.8bn of that came from slots, according to the Gambling Commission. Table games are the smaller share.
Table games did make the move, though. Roulette, blackjack and baccarat, the games London’s clubs were built around, are all played online now, and so is the job of the person running them.
At a live dealer casino, a trained croupier runs each round in real time, much as one would in a West End club, while the players join from home. What doesn’t travel is the rest of the evening: the dress code, the dinner and the walk back out into the street afterwards.
What comes next
The physical venues have not gone away, and they are still shaped by local rules. Westminster’s new licensing framework for alcohol, entertainment and late-night venues took effect on 1 October, including changes to the West End’s cumulative-impact zone.
Online, the next changes are more likely to come through phones and streaming quality than through new rules.
Feature image by Nathan J Hilton from Pexels
