Date of closure: 1st April 2023
Address (for reference only):
Majestic Bingo (Lost Halls)
Unit A, Hollywood Park
Hindpool Rd
Barrow-In-Furness
LA14 2NA
Apollo Bingo Barrow was a genuinely modern club rather than one of the town’s many old cinema conversions, occupying Unit A within the purpose-built Hollywood Park retail and leisure development in Hindpool. Planning for the site was approved in 1998 with construction completed around the turn of the millennium, bringing together a six-screen cinema, later Vue, a health club, restaurants and other leisure attractions alongside the bingo hall. It was originally operated as Apollo Bingo, though not part of the well-known 2005 deal that saw Top Ten Bingo acquire Apollo’s Rhyl, Blackpool and Caernarfon clubs. Instead, the Barrow unit later became part of the Majestic Bingo operation, which curiously retained the Apollo branding throughout, with Companies House records confirming Majestic held the lease from at least 2014.
There’s a nice bit of local irony in the name too, since the new club sat nowhere near the old Apollo Cinema, a separate town-centre building that had itself traded under the Apollo name before closing when the Hollywood Park multiplex opened in February 1999. The bingo club offered the standard modern package of paper and electronic bingo, gaming machines, food and a licensed bar, and clearly built up a loyal local following, with one long-serving staff member recalling a decade working there. Its end came in early 2023, when a planning report for a replacement Smyths Toys store noted that Apollo Bingo had been struggling against competition from the newer Opera Bingo on Holker Street, with rising costs and falling demand cited more broadly across Cumbria’s entertainment sector that year. Today the unit is occupied by Smyths Toys, a fittingly full-circle ending for a bingo hall that itself represented the shift from old cinema conversions to purpose-built retail-park venues.
Other Lost Halls In The Area
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