Chain: Coral Bingo

Coral’s story begins with Joseph “Joe” Coral, a Polish-born immigrant who was born in 1904 in Poland to a Russian father and a Polish mother, before his family moved to England in 1912. He began bookmaking in the 1920s, and by 1981 the company was operating more than 650 betting shops under the Coral name, having diversified along the way — the wider business, known as the Coral Leisure Group, had grown to include casinos, hotels, restaurants, Pontins holiday camps, squash clubs, bingo clubs, and real estate.

In 1981, facing declining profitability after losing several casino licences, Coral Leisure Group was acquired by Bass Leisure, the leisure division of Bass plc — the brewing company. This is the pivotal moment where the Coral bingo clubs and Coral betting shops began their separate journeys. By 1983, operating under Bass, the bingo side had 22 clubs trading under the Coral brand, along with another 24 located in Pontins holiday camps.

Over the following decade, Bass built up its bingo estate significantly, purchasing a chain of 80 bingo clubs from Thorn EMI in 1983, adding another 30 clubs through the purchase of Zetters Leisure in 1988, and then acquiring Granada plc’s 74-club bingo chain in May 1991. This merger with Granada’s clubs prompted a full rebrand, with the Coral, Zetters, Thorn EMI, and Granada clubs all combined under a single new brand: Gala Bingo, formed in 1991 when the Granada Social Clubs merged with the Coral Social Clubs, then owned by Bass plc. Gala later became Buzz Bingo following its 2018 rebrand.

Meanwhile, the betting shop side of Coral stayed under Bass’s ownership for a time before changing hands multiple times over the following decades, eventually becoming part of Ladbrokes Coral, and today trading as part of Entain plc’s wider group.

So while modern “Coral Bingo” and Coral the bookmaker share a name and common ancestry, they’re now genuinely separate propositions: Coral Bingo today exists purely as an online brand, built on the same software and templates as sister sites like Foxy and Gala Bingo, run by Entain, while the physical Coral betting shops remain a distinct high street business. The original retail Coral bingo clubs from the 1980s no longer exist under that name — they live on today, several corporate name-changes later, as Buzz Bingo’s physical clubs.

Listed here are the clubs that closed whilst still branded as Coral Bingo.