Most people who work near Leicester Square have written it off entirely. It's cinema queues, chain burger joints and a man in a Deadpool suit charging for photos.
But head to the square's north-east corner, past the Odeon, and there's a building most of that crowd walks straight past: the Hippodrome. It's been a theatre, an aquatic circus venue, a nightclub, and since 2012 has housed the biggest casino in central London.
A Building That Refuses to Sit Still
The Hippodrome opened in 1900 as a variety theatre, built around a genuinely strange party trick: a stage rigged to sink into a 100,000-gallon water tank for aquatic spectacles, complete with elephants swimming through it as part of the show.
In 1983, nightclub impresario Peter Stringfellow took the building over and ran it as one of London's loudest nightclubs for years. Then, from 2009, father-and-son entrepreneurs Jimmy and Simon Thomas took over the lease and spent three years and a reported £40m stripping the nightclub fittings back out, reopening it as a casino in 2012 and restoring the original Edwardian plasterwork along the way.
The Hippodrome is all gilt ceilings, a sweeping central staircase, and a building that has clearly lived several other lives before this one. You're not gambling in a shed. You're doing it under a roof that used to hold a working water tank.
Most people's only real contact with a casino these days is through a phone screen, and there's nothing wrong with that. If you want to get a feel for the games before committing to a live table, the best online casino sites will let you run through blackjack, roulette and a few poker variants without leaving the sofa.
But sitting at a felt table under a restored Edwardian ceiling with real chips in front of you is a genuinely different experience, and that's what the Hippodrome is built around.
The Poker Room Is the Biggest Draw
Here's the thing most casino floors get wrong: poker ends up as an afterthought, a couple of tables squeezed in behind the roulette wheels because someone upstairs insisted on it. The Hippodrome does the opposite.
Poker is the anchor. Multiple tables run cash games and tournaments most nights, and the room has built a genuine reputation on the UK circuit rather than existing just to tick a box.
Walk in on a Tuesday and you'll find a mix that's rare in one room: regulars who've been coming for a decade, tourists chasing the novelty of having played poker in London, and every so often someone whose face you half-recognise from a televised final table.
Dealers don't rush hands along like they're clearing the table for the next sitting. Nobody's checking your cufflinks at the door, either. You need a stake and a seat, not an introduction from a member.
Why This Works for a City Crowd
Poker rewards exactly the instincts that get sharpened in trading rooms and boardrooms: patience, discipline, and reading the person across the table rather than just the cards in front of you. That's not a coincidence.
Plenty of the Hippodrome's weeknight regulars work five minutes away and treat the room the way other people treat a squash court booking. It's competitive, it's controlled, and it doesn't switch off the moment you clock out.
Compare that to Mayfair's private members' casinos, where half the evening goes on working out who you need to know to get past the front desk. The Hippodrome skips that entirely: no membership, no vetting, no waiting for someone to vouch for you.
How to Actually Do a Night There
Treat it like a good private members' club rather than a quick punt. Eat first — the building has its own restaurants, so there's no reason to turn up hungry and distracted.
Take a slow lap of the main gaming floor before committing to a table, then head for the poker room once the early tourist rush has thinned out, usually a couple of hours in.
Weeknights run calmer and more serious; weekends bring a livelier, chattier table with more first-timers at it. Either suits a different mood, so pick based on what you actually want out of the evening rather than just turning up on a Friday out of habit.
It's a ten-minute walk from most of the West End's better bars and restaurants, which makes it easy to fold into a longer night instead of treating it as the whole plan.
If your game's rusty, it's worth 20 minutes at home running through hands before you sit down for real. Nobody at the table minds a beginner, but you'll enjoy it more if you're not learning the rules while everyone else is already playing them.
The Verdict
London doesn't have many casinos that are genuinely both historic and current at the same time — most pick one lane.
The Hippodrome manages both without much visible effort: a stage that once sank into a water tank for elephants now hosts a serious cash game on a Tuesday night, and somehow neither the history nor the poker suffers for the other's company.
For a City crowd who want their evening out to carry a bit of edge and a bit of story, it's a short cab ride away and worth the detour.
