In 2013, our Maidstone hall page gained a photograph of a woman celebrating a full house under the strip lights of a bingo hall that had been a theatre since 1934. Thirteen years on, the same room has a new name over the door, a new interior behind it, and a chain spending £25m to repeat the trick across Britain. We’ve been keeping pictures of these halls the whole time. This is what the makeover looks like, slide by slide.
Where the Pictures Came From
Since 2013, our halls directory has kept an individual page for every UK bingo club we can trace, and most pages carry photographs of the building, inside and out. Nobody was thinking about before-and-after pictures at the time. We were just documenting halls, in whatever decor they happened to have.
Then the industry repainted itself, twice, and the archive quietly turned into something rarer.
Slide the Years
Drag the handle to swap one era for the other. The starkest change in the set is the outside of the Clifford Street club in Byker, which our directory pictured in 2020 as a purpose-built box beside its car park. By reopening night in 2026 the same building glows, red light running the length of the rooflines and a lit Buzz roundel filling the glass atrium. Talk about a glow-up!
Clifford Street, 2013
Clifford Street, 2026
Another stunning transformation was the Sheffield Parkway club. In our before and after we have the old venue looking quite dated and grubby, and then move the slider to see the stunning modernised transformation. It’s clear to see what the money has been spent on!
Sheffield Parkway, 2026
Sheffield Parkway, 2014
And then there’s Tooting, the exception that explains the rule. The 1931 Granada on Mitcham Road has a Grade I listed interior by the Russian theatre designer Theodore Komisarjevsky, and no refit will ever touch it. Some rooms get transformed. The best room in British bingo gets preserved, and the operator knows it. It’s not called the ‘cathedral of bingo’ for nothing!
Tooting, 2021
Tooting, 2013
We saved these pictures to keep the directory accurate. It’s only lining them up years later that you see what a quiet rebuild of British bingo has been going on. A lot of people think bingo is in decline but it’s clear to see that there is a lot of investment, and preservation when it comes to venues like Tooting.” — Andrew Palmer, founder, Bingotastic
A Hundred Signs Swapped
The first wave was the big one. In 2018, the Gala retail estate rebranded as Buzz Bingo, and around a hundred clubs swapped their signs. Our afterlife report found that 92 of the 202 “closed” halls in our records never actually stopped playing bingo; most of them are this rebrand, recorded twice under two names. The white and blue went up, the interiors followed over the years after, and a generation of clubs that had looked the same since the nineties got new lounges, new bars and new carpets.
The photographic difference is bigger than a colour change. The Gala-era shots in our archive show tinsel at Christmas, Elvis nights, themed evenings in rooms that still carried the bones of their cinema years. The Buzz-era shots of the same rooms show something closer to a modern leisure venue.
The £25m Investment Wave
The second wave is happening now, and it has a budget attached. In July 2025, Buzz announced a multi-year refurbishment programme worth £25m, financed through Barclays, with eight clubs in the first tranche and more to follow.[1] Chief executive Dominic Mansour framed it plainly: “This is all about modernising bingo for the next generation of players and taking our clubs to the next level.”
The coverage puts the estate at around ninety venues in scope but our last count showed 76 open (July 2026).[2] Possilpark in Glasgow and Ipswich have already had the treatment, and Fishponds in Bristol reopened at the end of January with a new bar called The Fishbowl and Gareth Gates singing on opening weekend.[3] Four of the finished clubs are worth walking through in pictures, because between Buzz’s own photography and our archive, you can see exactly what the money bought.
Sheffield Parkway, the Prototype
The programme’s first showcase, relaunched in July 2025 and billed as the “bingo club of the future”.[4] The 1994 building on Cricket Inn Road got a new main hall under a wall of LED screens, a players’ lounge, a hand-painted Sheffield skyline by the local artist Willustration, and a bar the press releases never mentioned. It’s called Steelies. We found the name painted over the taps in the club’s own reopening photos, which tells you something about how quietly these details are being done.
Feltham, the London Flagship
Feltham reopened in the last week of October 2025 with the biggest single change on the list so far, a purpose-built stage for live entertainment and what the trade press called one of London’s largest AV screens, plus a new bar, a membership concierge desk and an expanded entrance.[5] The photos show the screen running £100,000 game promotions above a full house, and a corner the old club never had, a living plant wall with Bingo Terrace written across it in neon script. Chief operating officer Stevie Shaves called the approach blending “classic elements everyone loves with modern features”, and this is the clearest picture of what that means in practice.
Feltham is also one of our 22 double-exposure buildings. The directory page and its old Gala twin hold interiors from the plain purpose-built years, before anyone had thought to put a garden indoors.
Newcastle and Charlton’s Bar
The Clifford Street club in Byker reopened over the weekend of 7 March 2026 with £26,000 in prizes and the programme’s best piece of naming.[6] The new bar is Charlton’s, a tribute to Jack Charlton, who opened this club in 2005. The refit added booth seating, a reworked lounge and a mural that runs the length of the hall, St James’ Park at one end and a Newcastle Brown Ale bottle the size of a doorway at the other.
Basildon and the New Town Tap
The newest of the four, revealed on 25 and 26 April 2026 with over £26,500 in prizes across the weekend.[7] Basildon is a proud postwar new town, so the neon over the new bar reads The New Town Tap, and the refreshed lounge got a mural of local landmarks to go with it. The photos show the rest of the kit: a grab-and-go wall marked Pick Up & Play, greenery and neon in the corners, and the same warm-lit booth lounges as the other three, dressed in Essex rather than Yorkshire or Tyneside.
Murals and Town-Named Bars
Walk through those four galleries again and the playbook assembles itself, though no press release has ever joined it up. Polka-dot supergraphics on the hall walls. A living green wall with a neon script sign. A hand-painted mural of the town the club lives in. And a bar named for something only locals would name, from a nickname for Sheffield to a footballer to the town’s own planning history.
That’s a considered piece of brand thinking hiding in plain sight. The old halls were local by accident, through decades of the same faces in the same seats. The new ones are local by design, because the operator understands that a bingo club competes with the pub and the sofa, and the sofa doesn’t have a mural of your high street. Whether a painted wall can do the work of fifty years of Friday nights is a fair question. The point is that somebody with £25m thinks it can.
More Revamps Coming Soon
The programme is moving faster than the press coverage. Buzz’s head of brand communications, Mark Fletcher, tells us the last twelve months have brought new bars, lounges and big screens to twelve clubs: Sheffield, Stockport, Leeds, Feltham, Glasgow, Ipswich, Bristol, Weston-super-Mare, Medway, Newcastle, Basildon and Derby, with more in the pipeline. The spend runs past the paintwork too, taking in 10,000 new touchpads across the clubs and new wifi for the whole estate. Even the newly bought Hull Astoria has already had its refurbishment.
Our pages for Leeds and Stockport still hold photographs of both clubs as they looked before their refits, so the before pictures for the next round of comparisons are already saved. As each club gets its turn in the galleries, this page will grow.
And all of this is happening in an industry that mostly gets written about in the past tense. High-street bingo has been contracting since the seventies. Nobody spends £25m redecorating a game they think is finished. The money is going back into the rooms where the crowds still gather, and the photographs above are what that confidence looks like with the paint still fresh.
The taxman has picked a side, too. In the November 2025 Budget the government abolished Bingo Duty outright, and since 1 April 2026 the halls in this piece have kept the 10% of takings that used to go to the Treasury.[8] A tax that stood for decades is simply gone, at exactly the moment operators are finding £25m for new stages and murals. Money like that tends to find its way back into the clubs, which can only be a good thing.