Gambling is an invisible harm in many communities in and around Govanhill. In the first of this multi-part feature, we use Victoria Road to explore betting establishments on our high streets, and how Govanhill compares to more affluent parts of the city.

by Jack Howse | Illustrations by Rachael Procter & Laura Hurst

Next time you walk down your local high street, count how many bookies you see. What happens inside is usually hidden by eye-catching posters advertising odds and fixtures. Only the doorways offer a glimpse inside. But once you start noticing them though, you will see they are everywhere.

In fact, the number of bookies nationally is huge. In 2020, the Gambling Commission reported that there were over 10,000 premises in Britain – more than the number of stores run by the eight largest supermarket chains in the country. The numbers are even starker here in Glasgow. It has more bookies per person than any city in the UK with one betting shop for every 3,200 people.

As people shift their spending habits online, and shops close down, we frequently hear about the death of the high street, so why are there still such a large number of betting shops on our high streets, especially considering how easy it is to place a bet online these days?

Gerda Reith is a sociologist of gambling, addiction and consumption at the University of Glasgow and has considered this very question in her research. “Bookies have been a part of communities for a long time, and it’s a kind of cultural habit.” she told us. “There's not actually many community spaces where people can go, whereas a betting shop does offer that. It's somewhere to go in, to hang around to speak to people… when there's not very many public spaces where you can go, these venues are public spaces”.

However, the number of betting shops is only half the picture – the geography of betting shops is even starker when mapping it against a geography of deprivation. When compared with the Scottish Multiple Deprivation Index, 42 percent of Glasgow’s betting shops are in the most deprived fifth of the city. In contrast, just 2.5 percent can be found in the most affluent fifth. That’s nearly 17 times less.

This of course has an impact on gambling addiction in these areas. According to Gerda’s research, those living in the most deprived areas are over five times more likely to experience gambling harms than those living in the least deprived.

Graph of different type of establishments on Victoria Road

Faced with these sobering statistics, we wanted to map the spread of gambling premises here in Govanhill. The results are pretty shocking. We found that in Govanhill, there are six bookmakers – four on Victoria Road, one on Cathcart Road and one on Aikenhead Road. If we take the population as approximately 15,000, this works out at about one bookmaker for every 2,500 residents. In contrast, Byres Road, a high street in the city’s more affluent West End that is the same length as Victoria Road, has only one betting shop.

The statistic that there are more betting shops than big-chain supermarkets also holds true on Victoria Road; Sainsburys, Lidl and Tesco are the three places on Victoria Road to wrangle with a self-service checkout compared to the five stops (including a gaming arcade) to spin a digital roulette wheel. In fact there are more betting places than there are newsagents, pharmacies, pubs, and banks.

But the number of places you can put a bet doesn’t end with the bookies. There are the fruit machines inside pubs, the gaming arcades and the lottery tickets and scratchcards on supermarket counters. If we count all these places, the number of places you can place a bet on Victoria Road more than doubles to eleven. That’s more than the number of grocers and pubs combined.

As Gerda highlights, these spaces have become a place for people who might not have anywhere else to go. They’re warm, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know much English, you don’t have to be buying drinks and you can keep a low profile. Yet the proliferation of these spaces can lead to real harm and reduce health and wellbeing for people affected by addiction.

Over the course of this week, we will explore how deep the problem is, how it affects different communities and what the solutions might be.

This multi-part feature produced by our team is paid for by the Glasgow Gambling Harms Fund available from the Glasgow Council of Voluntary Services (GCVS) as part of a pathfinder project to support the delivery of the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms in Scotland and the Public Health Priorities.