Genting Casino in London’s Trocadero: Why the Project Could Become the Biggest Opening of 2026
For most of the past decade the London Trocadero has been the West End’s most famous empty promise: a vast, listed entertainment complex between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, bought by Malaysia’s Genting Group in 2016, stripped of its arcades and cinemas, and quietly waiting for its second act. In 2026 that wait may finally be over — and the prize at stake is nothing less than the biggest casino opening London has seen this century.
Genting is no speculative newcomer. The group runs more than thirty casinos across the UK, including Crockfords’ successor operations and Resorts World Birmingham, and globally it built Resorts World Sentosa and the Las Vegas Strip’s newest mega-resort. When Genting spends years assembling permissions for a single London address, the industry pays attention.
What Genting Actually Owns at the Trocadero
The Trocadero site wraps around the corner of Coventry Street and Great Windmill Street, a short walk from both Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square — the two busiest tourist junctions in Britain. The property combines listed facades with enormous internal floorplates that once held SegaWorld, the Funland arcade and a multiplex cinema.
Genting’s ownership matters because casino premises licences in the City of Westminster are effectively fixed in number and fiercely contested. A group that already holds the building, the licences and the local operating track record starts several lengths ahead of any rival scheme.
The Project So Far: What Is Confirmed
Confirmed elements are deliberately few — Genting communicates through planning documents rather than press releases. The redevelopment of the site into a mixed hotel, leisure and gaming complex has moved through Westminster planning in stages, with the hotel component leading and the gaming element designed into the lower floors where the old arcades used to pull their crowds.
What remains genuinely unconfirmed is the scale and branding of the casino itself: a full destination casino on the Resorts World model, or a boutique West End gaming floor closer to the group’s Crockfords heritage. Both options appear in the planning trail, and the final mix will shape what the opening means for London. As with any project of this size, timelines shift — check the current terms of the planning record and the operator’s announcements before treating any date as fixed.
Why the West End Needs This Opening
London’s casino geography has been frozen for a generation: the same handful of premium Mayfair clubs and mass-market Leicester Square floors sharing a market that has doubled in tourism volume. The 2005 Gambling Act’s promise of resort-style casinos materialised only outside the capital, leaving the West End without a single modern, large-format gaming venue.
A Trocadero casino would change the map overnight. The footfall is already there — the site sits inside the densest tourist flow in Europe — and the competition has shown the model works: the Hippodrome, five minutes away on Cranbourn Street, turned a listed theatre into the UK’s busiest casino and one of its most profitable.
How It Would Compare With the Hippodrome
The obvious benchmark is the Hippodrome, which proved that a listed entertainment building plus free entry plus multi-floor gaming equals a West End goldmine. A Genting Trocadero casino would enter with a larger floorplate, an attached hotel the Hippodrome lacks, and the group’s international VIP network feeding premium play from Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
| Factor | Hippodrome (established) | Trocadero project (Genting) |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Converted 1900 variety theatre | Listed entertainment complex, hotel-led |
| Entry model | Free, open 24/7 | Expected free entry with hotel packages |
| Gaming scale | Four floors, poker deck | Multi-floor destination casino proposed |
| Non-gaming draw | Magic Mike Live, Heliot steak house | Hotel, dining and leisure mix planned |
| VIP pipeline | Domestic and European | Genting’s international Resorts World network |
What It Means for the UK Market
- Premium-end pressure: Mayfair clubs would face a group with deeper Asian VIP connections than any London competitor.
- Mass-market expansion: free entry at Trocadero scale would grow the casual segment rather than merely cannibalise existing floors.
- Employment and training: a destination casino creates hundreds of dealer and hospitality jobs in a district that already struggles to staff its venues.
- Regulatory scrutiny: a 2026 opening lands in the era of affordability checks and the Gambling Act review — expect the licence conditions to be the tightest ever applied to a UK casino.
Watch the ripple effects on the capital’s poker scene as well. London’s tournament calendar is currently split between the Hippodrome and the suburban rooms; a Genting floor with Resorts World backing could bid for the European festival stops that now default to King’s Resort in Rozvadov or Casino de Barcelona.
Timeline and What to Watch
Large Westminster schemes move at the speed of planning committees and conservation officers, not press cycles. The signals to watch are hotel-brand announcements for the upper floors, fit-out tenders for the gaming levels, and any update to the premises licence conditions lodged with the council — each has preceded previous Genting openings.
Until doors open, treat every “confirmed opening date” circulating online with suspicion; the only reliable sources are the planning record and the operator’s own statements. We will update this report as the project firms up.
The Bigger Picture
Whatever its final form, the Trocadero project confirms the trend we track in our report on Europe’s transforming casinos: the future of the European casino is the integrated entertainment block, not the standalone gaming hall. If Genting delivers, London 2026 becomes the clearest proof yet — and our European casino travel guide will need a new first stop.
