Norwich Gambling Shop Wins Permission to Open 24 Hours a Day

^{St Stephens Street in Norwich city centre, where the Admiral gaming centre has run for years. (Photo: Evelyn Simak / Wikimedia Commons)}

A gaming centre on Norwich's St Stephens Street can now open around the clock after the city council's planning officers removed the last restriction on its hours.

Norwich City Council granted the change under application reference 26/00658/VC on 21 September 2026, according to the council's own planning register. The decision lifts a condition that had capped opening hours at the Admiral centre, run by operator Luxury Leisure, at 7am to 2am.

A Long-Running Dispute Over Hours

The 7am-to-2am limit traced back to an earlier permission, reference 23/01036/VC, which was only secured after Luxury Leisure won an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate in 2024. Luxury Leisure applied on 6 July 2026 to remove that condition entirely and let the premises trade 24 hours a day.

It is not the only recent case of a licensing decision being challenged and reversed. A planning inspector overturned a council's ban on a gambling arcade in North Shields earlier this year, a sign that operators are increasingly using the appeals and variation process to push back on local opening-hours limits.

Council planners said in their decision that the centre had already been trading during the extended hours without triggering significant noise or anti-social behaviour complaints. Officers concluded the change would not harm the living conditions of nearby residents, even though the site sits outside Norwich's designated late-night activity zone.

'I am against the extension of Admiral Casino's operating hours. The fact that they're open past midnight at all is worrying to me as a local student, I can see its impact on the street at night and it makes me feel unsafe,' one local student told the council during consultation.

Not the First Round-the-Clock Approval

Norwich's decision follows a pattern seen elsewhere in England this year. A council in the West Midlands approved a 24-hour licence for a casino in Smethwick despite objections from police and health bodies, and Northern Ireland saw a similar bid backed by a local business group in Ballymena. Licensing authorities have generally accepted operators' arguments that round-the-clock trading, once already happening in practice, causes no fresh harm once formally sanctioned.

Norwich City Council's environmental protection team and Norfolk Police's architectural liaison officer both submitted consultation responses on the application, which are listed among eight documents on the public file. Neither raised an objection that stopped the approval going through.

The permission comes with the standard condition that the change of operating hours must take effect within three years or the approval lapses. For now, the Admiral centre on St Stephens Street is free to stay open every hour of the day.

Land-based venues stretching their hours runs alongside the always-open nature of live dealer tables on operators' own sites, though the two sit under different regulators: gaming centres answer to local licensing authorities on hours and premises conditions, while remote gambling sits with the Gambling Commission.

Local residents who objected during the consultation period have no further right of appeal against the decision itself, though any future noise or nuisance complaints would go through the council's environmental protection team rather than the planning process.