Spin doctors: gambling firms adopt hard tactics to flood towns with 24hr slot machines

News Snapshot:

It is almost 2am in Peterborough and a handful of punters are wordlessly feeding their money into the machines at Merkur Slots. A fragment of a song, the lyric “nothing to lose”, drifts through the shop as their funds rapidly evaporate. Closing time is fast approaching, but that does not mean the end of the gambling. Five minutes’ walk down Lincoln Road, a near-deserted street lit by the neon signs of shuttered vape shops and fast food outlets, sit two more Merkurs, this time with 24-hour licences. Even in the small hours, many of the roughly 20 machines in each...