The Victoria concludes £15m refurbishment: ‘When you ask what you get for £15m, you get everything’
The casino has seen room for more slots added, improvement to its poker rooms, a revamp of customer-facing areas and more.
Key points:
– The Vic, Grosvenor Casinos’ London flagship property, has completed a £15m refurbishment
– Gambling Insider spoke exclusively to Victoria Casino Venue Director Peter Turpin (pictured left) and Grosvenor Casinos Managing Director Mark Harper (pictured right) on the refurbishments
Grosvenor Casinos has concluded its £15m ($20m) refurbishment of its flagship London property, The Victoria (otherwise known as The Vic).
The refurbishment has been extensive, with upgrades made to its casino floors, customer-facing façades, restaurant, staff areas and more.
The layout of slots has been adjusted in response to changes to land-based UK casino regulation proposed by the UK Government Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), allowing the casino to host 80 machines, while upgrades have also been made to The Victoria’s 24/7 poker rooms.
Gambling Insider spoke exclusively to Grosvenor Casinos Managing Director Mark Harper and Victoria Casino Venue Director Peter Turpin on these refurbishments. When we asked Turpin what a £15m refurbishment looks like, he explained:
“Well, the Victoria refurbishment has covered everything. It’s been phased refurbishment, so we’ve closed parts of the casino off at the time. We never shut the entire casino off. We continued trading right the way through… When you ask what you get for £15m, you get everything.
“We’ve even got our own dedicated substation, because we wanted to make sure that, with all this new kit that we’re putting in with the land-based reform, with slots, etc, we made sure that we had sufficient power. Everything is being considered.
Where we used to have one passenger lift, we’ve now got three passenger lifts. We had over £1m spent on HVAC and air conditioning. You name it, we’ve got it. It’s all brand new and state of the art… every single item is what our customers want.”
We also asked how such a refurbishment is budgeted. Said Harper: “It’s complex, budgeting at this scale. But, we have our own internal property team, and we also contract specialists for those areas where we don’t have the internal expertise. For example, quantity surveyors take a pretty key role in making sure we cover every single cost.
“Once we decide what we’re going to do, we contract designers and we agree on a scheme, then work with quantity surveyors to make sure we understand the implications of exactly what we’re doing and exactly what the cost will be. Inevitably, on a building such as The Vic, where there is such a large degree of infrastructure work, there is always the opportunity for us to stumble across something that we weren’t expecting. There were a number of examples of that, so we do tend to build a contingency into the project to cover those unexpected costs.
“It’s a long process. It’s fairly detailed, and the bigger you go in terms of scale, the more opportunity there is to identify some issues that perhaps you hadn’t planned for, which is why the contingency tends to be there on the bigger projects.”
For the full interview, check out this week’s upcoming issue of GI Friday.
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