Gambling: A Story of Remarkable Stability in Fast-Changing High Streets

High streets, the main commercial streets in towns and cities, have undergone significant transformations due to the evolving urban retail landscape. Despite these changes, this study demonstrates that the presence of gambling venues in Great Britain remained remarkably stable between 2014 and 2023. Using points of interest data, we constructed a panel data set of gambling shops on high streets. Employing simple autoregressive models estimated with random forests, we predicted annual gambling frequencies during 2015 to 2023 using 2014 frequencies as the sole predictor. Our results show a predictive accuracy of 91.8 percent by 2019, which remained robust at 86.2 percent in 2023, even after the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This highlights the notable stability in the frequency of gambling shops on high streets. Additionally, we developed a two-tiered analytical framework that confirmed this stability across different types of local authorities and high streets. Given the geographically bounded negative externalities of gambling, these findings provide a comprehensive understanding of the evolving spatial footprint of gambling shops. They also offer broader insights into how retail environment characteristics influence the resilience of leisure businesses in diverse urban contexts, contributing to ongoing discussions on high street revitalization.