Grosvenor Casino, St Giles has just been named the best casino in Europe. Not the best in London. Not the best in Britain. The best across the continent’s ten most visited cities, according to fresh data from Casinos.com
It scored 4.8 out of 5 on Google reviews, ahead of anything in Paris, Vienna or Amsterdam. Grosvenor has been running casinos in Britain since the 1970s, so this isn’t some flashy newcomer getting lucky with a handful of five star reviews. It’s one of the older names in UK gaming, sitting in one of the busiest corners of central London.
Location does a lot of the work
St Giles sits right on the edge of the West End, close enough to the theatres that drew more than 17 million theatregoers last year (https://solt.co.uk/data-and-research/), almost a quarter of them visitors from abroad. Catch a show, wander a few minutes down the road, and you’re at the tables. It’s an easy pitch, and it’s one very few of the other nine cities in this ranking can make quite as well.
Compare that to somewhere like Venice, where the casino is a destination in its own right, a boat ride away from wherever tourists are actually staying. London doesn’t need that kind of planning. You fall out of a matinee, you’re basically there already.
What’s actually on the floor
The games themselves are fairly standard for a London casino: American roulette, blackjack, three card poker, Punto Banco, Shoot Dice. Nothing revolutionary, just done well, which seems to be enough.
For anyone working out how to fund a night there without linking a bank card straight to a gaming account, Casinos.com, leading experts on Paysafecard online casinos (https://www.casinos.com/uk/paysafecard), flags prepaid vouchers as one of the more common ways UK players keep a lid on spending. Buy a set amount up front, spend that, stop. No overdraft surprises the next morning.
Paris and Vienna weren’t far off
Second place went to Club Circus Paris, on 4.5. It has 31 tables between poker and dealer games, its own restaurant and bar, and it happens to sit close to Parc des Princes and Roland Garros, so sports fans passing through get a reason to drop in too.
Vienna’s Casino Baden took third with 4.4. It’s a protected cultural building, one of the largest and most elaborate casinos anywhere in Europe, and that history alone puts it ahead of anywhere chasing a purely modern look. You don’t get marble staircases like that from a 2019 refit.
Madrid and Amsterdam rounded out the top five. Casino Gran Via I Poker Room scored 4.2, all old world formality, dark wood and card tables that feel like they’ve hosted the same regulars for decades. Holland Casino came in at 4.1, sleeker, brighter, more contemporary. Different eras, same appeal.
London doesn’t need the casino to sell itself
London and Paris were two of Europe’s three most visited cities between 2019 and 2023, each pulling in over 20 million visitors a year once you strip out the pandemic years. That’s the real backdrop here. A city already moving that many people through it doesn’t need a casino to be the reason someone visits. It just needs to be worth stopping into once they’re there, which is a much lower bar to clear.
South West London has had its own taste of that lately. Local pubs and bars saw spending rise by more than 11% during England’s World Cup run this summer. Same principle, different postcode: give Londoners a reason and they’ll spend the evening out, whether that’s a pub screening a match or a casino floor a short walk from the theatres.
Barcelona and Rome tied for sixth on a score of 4. Athens, Milan and Venice made up the bottom three, all under 4, which says more about how strong the competition was than anything actually wrong with those cities. A 3.8 in Venice is still a decent night out. It just wasn’t a 4.8 in London.
London was already pulling in crowds through its theatres, its pubs and its restaurants long before this ranking existed. Now it’s got a casino to point to as well, and it happens to be a short walk from wherever the evening started.
Featured image credit: Tyson Milanovich via Unplash
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