‘I’d rather have an empty site than another gambling venue’

‘My children ask me every time we walk past what these shops do,’ John Keane, a father of two young children, wrote to the council. ‘They look fun and interesting, and can we go.’ He was objecting to a 24-hour gambling arcade planned for Putney High Street, and he was far from alone.

Fifty-eight people wrote to oppose the plan. Not one wrote in support. Among them were a former prison chaplain, a former magistrate who once sat on the council’s own licensing committee, parents who walk their children past the door each morning, and a woman who objected that she no longer felt safe walking home from the station at night. At 6pm on Thursday 9 July, a panel of councillors will decide whether the arcade can open.

The most striking letter came from Elizabeth Bridge, a former chaplain at HMP Wandsworth. She still meets men she knew in the prison sleeping rough around Putney High Street, many of them with gambling addictions, and warned that another arcade ‘would attract and keep them in the High Street’. Her plea was simple: ‘Putney does not want to slide into an unpleasant version of Las Vegas.’

Elizabeth Hopper made the case from inside the system. She was once a magistrate on the Wandsworth licensing committee, back when magistrates weighed the numbers before granting a gaming licence. She would rather the empty unit became ‘a table tennis club, a chess club’, somewhere young people could gather without being drawn towards ‘an addiction which is likely to lead to money problems’. Gamblers rarely come out ahead, she added: ‘you rarely see a destitute bookie’.

Others were blunter. ‘I’d rather have an empty site than another gambling venue,’ wrote Christer Magnuson. Iñigo Lopez Ayala, a father of two living seconds from the site, said his children were ‘naturally drawn to their bright lights, bold colours’ and ‘frequently ask questions about them’. Sabina Omar put it plainly: ‘As a woman walking alone at night from the Putney station, I should have the right to feel relatively safe.’

What is being proposed

The applicant is Luxury Leisure, which trades as Talarius and runs the Admiral chain. It wants to turn 160-162 Putney High Street, the former Lost Society bar opposite the station and empty since November 2022, into an Adult Gaming Centre: a gambling arcade for over-18s, filled mainly with slot machines. It would open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Such arcades are built around the higher-stake machines, where a single £2 play can pay out up to £500. Victoria and Dennis Diamond, who live 40 yards away and sent the council a hand-drawn map of the gambling venues nearby, said each £2 machine takes about £32,600 a year, citing Gambling Commission figures, and called them ‘among the highest risk products for problem gambling’. The company already runs an Admiral arcade in Tooting. A second arcade, Merkur Slots, trades a few doors down at 152.

What the objectors argue

Almost every letter came back to children. The site sits directly opposite Putney station, about 50 yards from Putney Library on Disraeli Road, on a daily school-run route past primary and secondary schools that include Our Lady of Victories, Hotham, St Mary’s CE, Ark Putney Academy and Putney High School. As we explained in February, Wandsworth’s own gambling policy says premises should not sit near sensitive community locations such as libraries.

The second theme was clustering. The arcade would be the third gambling venue on one short stretch, with Paddy Power and Ladbrokes also within yards, as we reported last week. The Diamonds counted four gambling establishments within 40 yards of each other.

A third strand was the state of the street. Jesse Jayaseela, who lives in a flat overlooking the High Street, described walking daily past ‘urine, vomit, and open alcohol containers’ left outside the existing venue, and wrote: ‘I am sick of the antisocial behaviour already plaguing Putney high street.’ One couple, Paul and Rachel Canning, attached an academic study linking gambling outlets to local crime. Several objectors singled out the all-night licence as the gravest concern of all.

Not every letter was written from scratch. Between 35 and 40 of the 58 reproduced one of two circulated templates, most of them sent on 11 February, the day before the deadline. One objector, David Hews, openly forwarded the template to neighbours with a reminder of the closing date. The campaign was organised, then, but the sharpest detail sat in the dozen or so individual letters.

The MP, the society and the council

The most senior objector was Fleur Anderson, the MP for Putney, though her letter argued on planning grounds rather than the licensing tests, warning that a 24-hour arcade would create ‘a dead frontage with obscured windows and shutters’ and replace active retail. How much weight a planning argument can carry at a licensing hearing is itself an open question. The Putney Society lodged a formal objection through Victoria Diamond, the convenor of its community panel. No councillor submitted a letter, though two objectors noted that the Conservative ward councillor Ethan Brooks had flagged the library’s closeness at the planning stage.

For all of it, the committee starts from yes. Under the Gambling Act 2005, the council must grant a licence unless an application fails one of three tests, covering crime, fair gambling and the protection of children and vulnerable people. Its own policy may want to prevent clustering, but the Act gives it no power to refuse on that ground alone.

That could change. A new law passed this spring, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act, would let a council set a presumption against gambling clusters, but the national guidance is still being written and the council must first adopt its own assessment. Neither will be ready by 9 July. The council need not wait until its gambling policy expires in January 2028: the policy says it can be reviewed ‘in response to emerging risks’.

The hearing is public, at the Town Hall in Wandsworth from 6pm on Thursday 9 July. Only those who lodged a valid objection can speak, and that window has closed; objectors share 20 minutes between them before councillors ask their questions. The plan has been fought once already, when the council granted planning permission in December 2024 on the chair’s casting vote, after 624 residents objected.

Elizabeth Hopper, the former magistrate, was not sure her letter even fell within the rules. ‘But perhaps,’ she wrote, ‘it will make you think, if you have read this far.’