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Return to the Hippodrome
We caught up with Simon Thomas, Chairman of Hippodrome Casino Limited, developing the Hippodrome Theatre site on the corner of Leicester Square and Charing Cross Road in London, to find out how the project is advancing
Casino International: It’s quite a building, in a superb location – what’s the Hippodrome building’s history?
Simon Thomas: The building has always been in the centre of London’s entertainment district and it has had a number of uses over the years; it went from being an indoor ‘big top’ from when it opened in 1900, to a music hall from 1910 to the 1950s, then from 1957 to the early 1980s it became Talk of the Town with a false ceiling across the middle of the building, so it became a very large dinner/dance venue. Acts like Stevie Wonder, Cher, The Supremes to Julie Andrews, Lulu – the real stars of the era performed here. Following that Peter Stringfellow took the place on in 1983 and turned it into the UK’s first super-nightclub. That continued through the hands of various club operators to 2005 when it lost its premises licence for causing too many public order offences. The building sits right in the heart of London; we have quarter of a million people walking by on Cranbourne Street every day; unknown numbers coming down Charing Cross Road; 40million people a year using the tube station underneath us, and we’re also effectively on the crossroads between the Theatre District, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly and Chinatown.
Since we last spoke we have actually extended the development as we’ve acquired the building next-door, Cranbourne Mansions, so we have premises license extensions so that we can use that entire space. It puts us up to a gross 91,000 square feet which is getting quite useful! Importantly, the building on the side gives us some lateral floorspace. We now have three gaming areas: the basement area, which will be aimed at the transactional gambler, no great frills but good gambling: the ground floor, which is one very big floor across the space of the original theatre: then the first floor is for entertainment with a 200-seat cabaret theatre, 150-seat restaurant, lounge bar, toilets: then the top floor features a big poker room, smoking terrace, bar and a suite of private gaming and private dining rooms. It’s going to be a big casino but it will be quite different from anything else in London; besides being the biggest, we aim to provide the biggest range of games. We can bring in a lot of electronic product from across the world because we have the space for it; many places in the capital do not.
CI: How is the food and beverage side going to work?
ST: We’ve brought in an American operator on the F&B side, well, an Englishman that runs an American firm, to run that, because the Americans tend to do that kind of thing much better than we do. We also have a specialist to run the cabaret, because it is also a specialised field. From the customer’s point of view we want them to come in, get an excellent meal in a fantastic atmosphere, or have a drink in a great bar, or go to watch the cabaret, a late night comedy act, without even leaving to go to the casino. But from our point of view it gets them into the building, there’s a real crossover of business – it’s the way casinos work internationally. We can never be Vegas, because obviously we are in London, but we can be an international-style casino with many different offerings.
The casinos of England are not a lot of fun because they weren’t allowed to be under the old Gaming Act. With all the barriers to actually going into a casino, it’s amazing anyone went in at all. Not so long ago we still had the 48-hour rule between joining as a member and being able to go in; no advertising, no promotions, no electronic gaming, no live entertainment etc and they have all been deregulated. Casinos should be fun places where adult men and women can go for a night out.
The provinces have been able to change better than London in terms of what a casino can offer. London casinos in other locations are suffering and will suffer more as bigger casinos in better locations come along. The smoking ban has exacerbated the whole problem for those casinos too. Casinos like the Broadway Casino in Birmingham are good places for adults to go, many casinos outside London are custom built for purpose and it shows. When you really bore down into the subject there are very few places where ‘grown ups’ can go out for the evening for a safe night out. Adults go to restaurants, theatre, cinema… there’s very few places where adults can go and talk, have fun and enjoy a range of activities. We can certainly provide that.
CI: Has acquiring the building nextdoor affected your planned opening date of September 2011?
ST: Only by a number of weeks. We’re taking the building from the first floor upwards, so we don’t have any of the groundwork issues we’ve had with the Hippodrome. The timetable dovetails very well; we’ll have stripped the building nextdoor by the time the last of the basement slabs is laid in the Hippodrome. As we come up with the structure, we will be able to fit it out in the same timetable, so there’s minimal difference. We hope to open the doors in late October or early November 2011.
CI: Are you on schedule?
ST: Yes we are. The difficult bit was going downward, and the fear of finding something archeologically interesting! We had a representative from the Museum of London checking there was nothing of interest as we excavated the site; she did find what she thought was a World War II bomb which turned out to be a piece of banister!
We didn’t expect to find anything underneath us but it’s always a risk; that’s where a development can suddenly get very expensive and time-consuming.
CI: How will you accommodate smokers?
ST: On the top floor we will have a double-deck smoking terrace, with some outdoor gaming on the lower level too.
CI: Are all of your suppliers in place?
ST: We’re getting there. Everything that we need to have sorted out by this point, is sorted out – all of the long lead-time items like elevators, safes, for example. Soft furnishings and gaming equipment will be brought in at the appropriate time. The interior décor scheme is complete – we know what is going where, though we haven’t sourced every chair yet!
The gaming side is evolving and we’ve made a number of changes to our approach as we’ve seen new equipment become available. As you know there’s huge potential in electronic gaming which is not really being satisfied in English casinos, largely because casinos don’t have the space for a really good electronic offering. The way the market seems to be working is that more people are learning to play casino games online, and are very familiar with a screen-based approach to gambling. The electronic offering development has gone far beyond Roulette, there’s so much exciting product out there. We’ve been out to Macau and to Las Vegas to see how they do things; the Chinese seem to be much better than the Americans with their embracing of technology and arena-style layouts. It’s very impressive. We intend to pick the best of the best on that side, and in the live gaming side, and hopefully get the best of both markets.
CI: Have you had any surprises in the construction apart from the banister that was found?
ST: Nothing major – we’ve made tweaks around the plans depending on what we’ve found, some of which we were quite pleased to find. The poker deck on the top floor, which has a stunning view, was an area weren’t sure we could use when we started stripping out. The ceiling recess is much higher than we could see before, so we found a lot more space than we thought we had.
CI: I can’t help but think everything is coming together really quite beautifully for you… Things like the building next-door becoming available, for example.
ST: The adage that the harder you work, the luckier you get certainly comes into play – we have a good team, working very hard. We feel we have timed the entry into the market fairly well, being the last licence granted in London. We can take full advantage of the deregulation, optimise the building and its layout to make the most of it – and we can look at how others have dealt with the smoking ban, for example, or open door policy, and learn from that.
The credit crunch has, from our point of view been almost fortunate, because we’ve been able to make good deals with contractors and builders, and we’ve had the advantage of acquiring the building next-door as well. If the economy could wake up by September that would be even better…
The economy is of course affecting the main four casino operators in London as well, they have some debt problems either from their backers or their own funding issues, so they’re not able to invest in the market as much as they should be, and they’ve cut back on staff in some cases. It improves our competitive position, but we’d prefer an environment where the competition is stronger and is spending money to help drum up business for all of us.
CI: You and your father are financing this project yourselves with no bank backing – is that an option for the future?
ST: We’re thinking about taking bank finance as an option. When we started the project in July 2009, the chance of getting bank financing was between zero and not much more than that, and we didn’t need it; we always said we’d review it as the project went on. The whole credit market has changed now, and also the risk profile of the building. Back then if I’d gone to a bank and asked if they wanted to invest in a project where they’re digging down into the unknown, it’s unlikely I would have come away with investment. The actual profile of the development has changed as the risky part is now out of the way. So we’re sizing up whether to fund it with equity or with bank finance going forward.
CI: What’s going to be different to the Empire casino, which is just a short distance away?
ST: A lot, we hope. In terms of gaming product, a Roulette table is a Roulette table – but that’s like saying a steak’s a steak. The atmosphere you eat that steak in gives you a completely different experience. The Empire is a good club, but it’s basement and sub-basement so it can feel like a nightclub almost. They are by far the busiest casino in the country, their restaurant is fine, there’s a lot of positives there. But we feel we have a beautiful building with a much bigger frontage to exploit – the whole of the outside of our building will look like a casino, we will take full advantage of that. You’ll walk in to our casino at ground floor level, and we’ll offer a very broad range of games – plus we’ll have cabaret in the 200-seat theatre, and a separate poker room – but we can use the cabaret theatre as a tournament space so it need not interrupt the day-to-day gambling. They’re part of a large group but we’re a standalone operation so we can take service standards and indeed the overall experience to a whole new level
