The building on the corner of Cranbourn Street and Charing Cross Road, a few minutes' walk from the bottom of Wardour Street, has been letting people in for well over a century, and it still doesn't ask much of them. There's no membership to buy and no set dress code (smart casual is what most people go for), and the doors are open every hour of the year bar Christmas Day, and not much of Soho can say that. What began as a circus is now seven floors, nine bars, three casinos and three roof terraces.
So what's left once you take all of that away? The Hippodrome Online Casino is where you find out. It carries the venue's name and its black-and-gold colours, and one of its live roulette tables is run from inside the building itself, but the rest of what makes the Hippodrome the Hippodrome is still standing on the corner of Cranbourn Street.
Colour, Catalogue and One Wheel
The website uses the same gold on black as the sign over the door, and that's about as far as the resemblance goes. It calls itself the venue's digital partner, which describes the name and nothing else: it's a separate website using the Hippodrome name, not the casino moved online.
A floor only has room for so many tables. A website doesn't have that problem, so the live tables run roulette, blackjack, baccarat and poker, plus the game shows.
The live tables are the only real overlap. A dealer on camera turns the cards for people who aren't in the room, and one of those tables, Live Hippodrome Grand Roulette, is run from inside the venue itself, the site says. It's one wheel out of three casino floors.
What You Still Turn Up For
The building doesn't travel, obviously. Historic England's listing describes red sandstone and parapets once crowned with gladiatorial statues, and none of the noise goes either: a croupier calling no more bets two tables over, the crowd getting louder when the theatre empties, and how high the room is.
Dinner stays too. Heliot, on the first floor, seats a hundred and looks down over the main floor, the rooftop bar runs across three terraces, and Magic Mike Live plays in the theatre on the same floor as the restaurant, booking to the start of January 2028. Within living memory that last one was against the law: a 2000 briefing for MPs describes the then ban on casinos offering "other entertainments" as a rule meant to stop proprietors "baiting the hook with free cabaret or dancing". The Hippodrome does that now and doesn't hide it. And the people you came with. Dinner, the show, a drink on the roof, one of the party losing twenty quid at roulette on the way out and hearing about it at one of this year's new Soho openings the week after. None of that happens on a phone.
What the Website Is
The site isn't a substitute for the building and doesn't pretend to be. It's the games and the name, and that's it. Everything else, Heliot, the roof, the noise on a Saturday, is still on the corner of Cranbourn Street, where it has been since 1900.
