Do people love bingo where you live? Has your town got a legendary bingo hall with a great atmosphere? Does your hometown have a habit of producing lucky winners? In this article, we explore the places in the UK where bingo really is king.
People have been playing bingo in the United Kingdom for more than 200 years, but it was in the second half of the 20th century that it really grew in popularity.
From London to Lands End and Brighton to Blackpool, bingo halls sprung up around the country and captured the hearts of players everywhere who enjoyed a wide range of games and variants while making new friends and winning some money.
The advent of online bingo, which first appeared towards the very end of the 20th century, changed the landscape of how people play bingo, and many bingo lovers now choose to enjoy most of their game time from the comfort of their own homes.
However, despite many closures over the past 18 months, bingo halls still stand proud in many towns, and being able to meet face-to-face and play with friends and family has been important for many bingo lovers since the COVID-19 social distancing requirements were lifted.
In this article, we take a look at the UK’s bingo-loving towns and areas from a variety of perspectives, factoring in the areas of the UK with the most bingo halls per person, the towns where bingo is most searched for on the internet, and the luckiest bingo-playing towns in the country. Of course, no single metric can give a town claim to being the UK’s bingo heartland.
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Bingo-obsessed towns ranked by Google searches
There are many ways to find out how much the people in a particular place love bingo, and one such method is to analyse a town’s Google searches.
A piece of research carried out by Best New Bingo Sites did just that, taking the 10 most popular bingo search terms and finding out where they were most-often searched.
The research examined Google searches in 60 different UK towns and cities, and when the results were revealed they showed that Wrexham can lay claim to being the country’s most bingo-obsessed place, given that the Welsh city averages 12,133 monthly searches related to bingo.
Mecca bingo in Wrexham Image source: https://www.leaderlive.co.uk/news/19294025.mecca-bingo-will-reopen-club-wrexham/
Wrexham has a population of 135,132 and around one in every five of them, on average, searches online for bingo each month. Clearly a local obsession!
Coming in second place in the BNBS research was Hull, which has a population of 261,149 that carries out an average of 45,677 monthly searches for bingo. This means around one in six people in Hull are using the web to find information about bingo each month, so it’s no surprise that there are as many as five different bingo halls in the city centre alone!
Astoria Bingo Club in Hull Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Astoria_Bingo_Club,_Holderness_Road,_Hull_Apr23.jpg
Among Blackpool’s population of 140,954 there are 21,453 average monthly searches for bingo, reflecting the town’s long historic association with the game. Blackpudlian bingo fans are this year celebrating the opening of a brand new, multi-million pound purpose-built Club 3000 Bingo hall, reflecting the health of bingo’s popularity in Blackpool.
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Areas with the most bingo halls per person
While much can be revealed by analysing the search trends in different parts of the UK, it takes a thriving community of players to keep a land-based bingo hall up and running.
The smoking ban introduced in 2007, the rapid rise in popularity of online bingo, the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently the cost of living crisis, have all dented the coffers of Britain’s land-based bingo halls. Indeed, where there were once more than 1,500 bingo clubs nationwide, we are now down to around 350.
However, there are still parts of the country where people are spoiled for choice when it comes to getting out of the house to play bingo, and at the top of the ‘most bingo halls per head’ list is Lanarkshire in Scotland.
The county, which covers the southern part of Glasgow, is home to no fewer than 18 bingo halls, meaning that there is one hall for every 52,583 people.
Another northern area of the United Kingdom comes in second place in terms of most bingo halls per person, and that is Tyne & Wear/County Durham, where there are 28 bingo halls serving a population of 1.66 million people – which works out at one hall for every 59,394 people.
Proving that northerners really are bingo mad is Merseyside, which has a population of 1.42 million people and 17 bingo halls for them to play at, putting the region in third place on the list with a bingo hall for every 83,705 people.
Hippodrome Bingo Hall in St Helens, Merseyside Image source: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g227131-d12717511-Reviews-Hippodrome_Bingo_Hall-St_Helens_Merseyside_England.html
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Luckiest towns
Nothing breeds a love for bingo quite like winning, so in our search for the UK’s most bingo-obsessed places we decided to factor in the towns that produce the most winners.
Paddy Power bingo carried out a study in 2022 that revealed the luckiest locations for the highest payouts across the UK, analysing millions of game results from players at the popular online bingo website.
The results of the study ranked places in the UK by win rate – the percentage of bingo games that the average player in each place enjoyed a win.
Top of the list of lucky towns was Kirkwall all the way up north in the Orkney Isles, where players racked up an incredible 31 per cent win rate!
Kirkwall is the largest town on Orkney Image source: https://www.kirkwallhotel.com/
Second place for the highest win rate among UK bingo players was shared between the residents of Lymington in Hampshire and Isleworth in London, proving it’s not just northerners who are reaping the rewards for being bingo mad! Both places boast a win rate of 21 per cent – easy to see how you can become bingo obsessed if you enjoy a win every five games!
Honourable mentions in the lucky town stakes must also go to Melksham in Wiltshire (20 per cent win rate), Maesteg in Wales (19 per cent) and Wadebridge in Cornwall (19 per cent).
If your hometown hasn’t been mentioned above and you believe you’re a bingo-loving population, let us know where and why in the comments!
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