Spin doctors Firms are using tough tactics to fill town centres with 24-hour slot machine arcades

Councils warn planning and licensing laws leave them powerless to prevent spread of 'adult gaming centres' - but some are fighting back

- Rob Davies

It is almost 2am in Peterborough and a handful of punters are wordlessly feeding their money into the machines at Merkur Slots.

A fragment of a song, the lyric "nothing to lose", drifts through the shop as their funds rapidly evaporate. Closing time is fast approaching, but that does not mean the end of the gambling.

Five minutes' walk down Lincoln Road, a near-deserted street lit by the neon signs of shuttered vape shops and fast food outlets, sit two more Merkurs, this time with 24-hour licences.

Even in the small hours, many of the roughly 20 machines in each shop are doing a brisk trade.

Staff provide regular doses of caffeine and sugar, ferrying free coffee, chocolate bars and Haribo sweets to customers as they play their way through games such as Shaun the Leprechaun and Rainbow Riches. Some Merkur venues even have compact pizza ovens, to keep the punters playing.

Zoom out to national level and this picture - of towns and cities pockmarked by 24-hour slot shops - is replicated time and again.

Welcome to the business of "adult gaming centres" (AGCs) - the under-scrutinised network of slot machine arcades that are expanding rapidly on high streets, even as their more traditional cousins, bookmakers, retreat.

In Great Britain, the number of AGCs rose by 7% to 1,451 between 2022 and 2024, figures from the Gambling Commission show, reversing a longer-term decline since 2010, as gambling shifted online. Merkur alone has opened 100 new venues since 2020 and now has more than 230 in the UK, each packed with machines of varying types.

Including Merkur's rivals, there are now more than 14,200 £2-a-spin slot machines in Britain, each making £32,600 annually from customers, according to Gambling Commission data. On that basis, every terminal is sucking a sum close to Peterborough's average salary out of the fragile local economy.