My main experience of British seaside arcades, I am ashamed to admit, lay in the dim and distant 1970s when I spent some considerable time helping out in arcades along the East Coast, notably in the Skegness area.
It was therefore something of an education for me to talk with folk at the London Open Day recently when the full extent of the revolution in the British seaside arcade came home forcefully. Gone are the mixes of AWPs and amusements and gone to a large extent, sadly, are the prize bingos.
I knew of course that these days the AWPs (yes, of course, Category C) have to be physically segregated from the “pure” amusements and I suspected, accurately, that the prize bingos are no longer the money-spinners on a yield-per-square-foot basis that they used to be.
But it was only when talking with Michael Green over a cream tea in the UDC showroom that the full extent of the sea change at the seaside became evident. The 600 arcades on the coast (650, Michael thinks) are really now FECs, helped into that format, incidentally, as a side effect of that AWP segregation.
Ticket redemption and novelties are kings, although the pusher still has its place and merchandisers and cranes are important. In other words, pushers aside, an FEC as it is known and loved in other parts of the world. And talk to David Stenning at Embed; he regards 650 FECs as a largely untouched fresh stamping ground for his cashless system. “It only needs 20 machines and the benefits of cashless are obvious…”
Flashback to a memory of Billy Bell carrying buckets of coins, two at a time, into a windowless cubbyhole of a back office to sit for hours shirtless in the summer heat to bag up the proceeds of the cash boxes in his Ingoldmells arcade.
Are those days truly gone? The arcade owners may not miss those sweaty hours bagging up coins, and I know it is just another case of a wrinkly bewailing the passing of the good old days, but the seaside industry in those days, 40-50 years ago, had character and direction, charisma and a “sod everyone but the punter” attitude to the world.
I hope it hasn’t all passed on. Maybe I need a few days at a cashier’s desk again.
