Bingo is in decline but Glaswegians remain marking their cards

If you’d asked me about a week ago how I expected researching and writing a piece about bingo to go, I would have said ‘fine’. I would maybe have even said ‘fun’. And I would have been wrong. 

Bingo, I found out too late, is an extreme sport of the extremest proportions: a heads-down, nose-to-the-grindstone, don’t-even-think-about-asking-me-questions-for-your-silly-wee-paper sort of affair. Glasgow is known as the spiritual home of bingo. The BBC has said it, Paisley on the Web has said it, I’ve said it, and according to the hugely popular and highly reliable bingo website ‘bingowebsites.org.uk’, we have more bingo halls per head than anywhere else in Britain. That’s one bingo hall per 52,583 Glaswegians (as of September 2021) compared to one per 278,000+ Londoners.

Bingo halls across the UK have been on a steep and steady decline since 2005, largely owing to the Gambling Act introduced that year, but statistics show that here in Glasgow they’re still going strong. In my quest to find out why, I found out that such statistics barely scratch the surfaces of Glasgow’s bingfatuation.

Before writing this article, my bingo experience was meagre to say the least. That’s not to say I’d never binged, but my bunging was seldom and sporadic. At school, we’d make bingo cards of all the daft sentences our teachers would say in class, and bingo would later rear its ball-round head at charity do’s and Christmas ceilidhs, but I’d yet to set foot in an actual, proper, bingo hall. Walking into Carlton Bingo in Partick is therefore a milestone moment. I receive my bingo membership card with more pride than when I received my diploma in the post after skipping my graduation, and buying my first bingo dauber – clover-green – is likely the best one-pound-fifty I’ve ever spent.