Three of the grandest gambling houses in London shut within six years of each other. The Clermont Club on Berkeley Square went in 2018. The Ritz Club, gilded and subterranean beneath the Piccadilly hotel, followed in 2020 and never came back. Crockfords made it a hat-trick in October 2023, closing after 195 years of continuous play with around a hundred jobs going with it.
Read that as the end of gambling in Mayfair and you would be drawing exactly the wrong conclusion.
The Money Did Not Leave. The Building Did.
Here is the awkward statistic sitting underneath the closures: Britain wagers more now than it did when Crockfords was full.
None of that money evaporated when the doors shut on Curzon Street. It relocated, from rooms where a maître d’ decided whether you were suitable, to platforms where the only entry requirement is passing identity verification. Rankings of the best European online casinos now sort operators on payout speed, game libraries and licensing jurisdiction, which is a very different set of criteria from whether you know someone who knows someone.
That shift changed who does the vetting, and it is the whole story. A Mayfair club decided at the door whether a player belonged in the room. An online operator runs a compliance check and a payment screen. One of those systems is considerably more scrutable than the other, whatever you think of the aesthetics.
What Actually Closed, and Why
Crockfords was the significant loss. Founded in 1828 by William Crockford, a fishmonger’s son who relieved Regency aristocrats of eye-watering sums over hazard and whist, it made its founder one of the richest self-made men in England. It survived two world wars and every recession since the railway age. It did not survive the 2020s.
Genting valued the site at around £80 million. Paul Willcock, president of Genting Casinos UK, called it the end of an era, citing a combination of factors that had put high-end London casinos at a competitive disadvantage against other global markets.
Translated: the high rollers stopped arriving. The pandemic did the initial damage, and the post-Brexit removal of VAT-free shopping for visitors is widely blamed for keeping wealthy tourists away afterwards. Worth noting the chronology, because it undercuts the tidier political explanations doing the rounds. The Clermont and the Ritz closed years before anyone drafted a non-dom reform. It was the visitors who stopped coming first, not the residents who left.
Mayfair Is Not Empty
Three obituaries makes for a good headline and a misleading impression. Several rooms are very much still dealing.
Les Ambassadeurs, universally shortened to Les A, sits at 5 Hamilton Place and has since 1950, having been founded on Hanover Square in 1941. Its Le Cercle casino dates to 1961. It appeared in Dr. No and in A Hard Day’s Night, which is a genuinely absurd pair of credits for one address. It remains members-only and aimed squarely at premium players.
The Palm Beach on Berkeley Street has been a fixture for over fifty years, with roulette, baccarat and blackjack alongside a restaurant and a late bar. Marginally more sociable than the guarded private clubs, though still Mayfair, so nobody is turning up in muddy trainers unless they are very famous or very lost.
And on Curzon Street, the interesting one.
The American Arrival
Crown London Aspinalls at 27 to 28 Curzon Street became Wynn Mayfair when Wynn Resorts completed its acquisition on 5 June 2025. Trade reports describe roughly twenty gaming tables across a main floor, private salons and a rooftop terrace.
That is the detail worth pausing on. An American resort group with a Las Vegas and Macau portfolio does not buy a private London casino out of sentiment. Somebody with considerably better market data than the rest of us looked at Mayfair after three closures and concluded there was still a business there.
Which suggests the correct reading is not decline but consolidation. Fewer rooms, larger operators, and a clearer split between the ones chasing international premium play and the ones that were coasting on a name.
What to Actually Do With This
If you were hoping this piece would end with a recommendation, some bad news: most of the surviving Mayfair rooms are members-only and will not be admitting you on the strength of having read about them.
So treat them as architecture instead, which is the more rewarding visit anyway. Walk Curzon Street and Hamilton Place and look properly at the Georgian townhouses these clubs occupy. A remarkable number are listed, and Historic England holds the records if you want to know what you are looking at. The Clermont’s old home at 44 Berkeley Square is among the finest terrace houses in the city, and it was built as a private residence in the 1740s, roughly two centuries before anyone thought to put a roulette wheel in it.
There is something very London about that sequence. Aristocratic townhouse becomes gambling club becomes, eventually, something else again, with each occupant assuming theirs is the permanent use.
The Bit Worth Remembering
The clubs closed because the specific customer they were built for stopped travelling, not because the appetite went anywhere.
Crockfords lasted 195 years by being a room you had to be admitted to. That model finally met a version of itself with no door, no dress code and no maître d’ forming an opinion about your shoes, and the room lost.
Whether that counts as progress rather depends on how much you liked the shoes policy. But the next time you walk past a shuttered Georgian frontage on Curzon Street, the money it used to handle is not gone. It is on somebody’s phone, three streets away, being counted by a server in another country entirely. More on how the city keeps reinventing itself over culture.
