Chain: Top Rank Bingo
Top Rank Bingo was the name under which the Rank Organisation ran many of its bingo clubs across the UK before the brand was retired in the late 1990s. The clubs didn’t close. They were rebranded as Mecca Bingo, which is still going today, so Top Rank is best thought of as the chapter of the story before Mecca.
The brand’s roots lie in the Rank Organisation, the entertainment giant that grew out of the business interests of its founder, J. Arthur Rank, and dates its own origins to 1937. Rank owned a large cinema estate, and when cinema-going declined, many of those big picture houses found a second life as bingo halls. Mecca’s Gloucester club on Eastgate Street is a good example. It opened as the Plaza Super Cinema in 1935, was taken over by Rank in 1956 and renamed the Odeon in 1957, then closed as a cinema in 1975 and later became a Top Rank Bingo Club.
The company behind the name has a clear paper trail. It was incorporated on 10 October 1984 as Avaguard Limited, and by 21 November 1984 it had become Top Rank Clubs Limited. In March 1985 it was shortened to Top Rank Limited, the name it kept for the next twelve years. The same company, registered at Companies House under number 01854120, is still active today, now as Mecca Bingo Limited.
The big change came in 1990, when the Rank Organisation bought the Mecca Leisure Group for £512 million. Mecca brought with it hotels, theme parks, Hard Rock Cafes and around 85 bingo halls. That left Rank with two bingo brands under one roof, and over time the group moved to bring its clubs together under a single name. Mecca, the better known of the two, was the one that survived.
The switch is on the public record. The company changed its name to Mecca Bingo Limited on 3 November 1997, and clubs began to be renamed. The change made headlines on 25 December 1997, when a Top Rank club in Luton was rebranded as Mecca and members of the local Muslim community objected to a gambling business using the name of Islam’s holiest city. Local leaders met Mecca Bingo executives in January 1998. The company said the change wasn’t intended to offend and was part of a policy of putting its nationwide chain of bingo halls under one name. Reports at the time said the Luton club later dropped the Mecca name following the protests.
Meanwhile, the Rank Group, which was formed in the mid-1990s to take over the Rank Organisation’s business interests, was steadily moving away from its film and leisure past. By the 2000s it had refocused on gaming, with Mecca Bingo and Grosvenor Casinos as its main UK brands. The Top Rank name carried on in one place for a while longer, though. Rank’s Spanish bingo business was still reporting under the Top Rank España name in results published in 2009.
Anyone looking for a Top Rank club today will find that most of the old halls either became Mecca clubs or have since closed, with many former sites now converted to other uses – listed below are clubs that closed whilst under the Top Rank Bingo brand.
