Sarah Ainslie’s Bingo Portraits

Ever since the Mecca Bingo Hall closed in Hackney Rd last year, pending demolition and redevelopment into luxury flats, a bus has departed most nights at five-thirty from the nearest street corner picking up the former clientele from Bethnal Green and delivering them to the Mecca Bingo Hall in Camden Town. Last Sunday, Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I joined the merry throng on the bus for the trip across town to bring you the first instalment in this series of portraits of the Bingo stalwarts of Bethnal Green.

Joyce Allen

“I’ve been playing Bingo since I was nineteen and now I’m eighty-nine”

Julia Ettridge

“Joyce and I lost our husbands in 1995, and we have been coming to Bingo together every week since”

Audrey

“I’m eighty-one, I went to school in Hoxton and I’ve lived in London all my life. I have survived cancer and I live alone but my son and daughter give me money to go Bingo once a week, I look forward to it.”

Josephine & Bob Williams

“We’ve been married fifty years and we’ve always gone to bingo together.”

Josephine Williams

“It hasn’t made me rich but it hasn’t made me poor either!”

Rose & Sharon Davis

“It’s disgusting that they shut the Bingo hall in Bethnal Green. It was on our doorstep and you could always guarantee there’d be someone you knew to talk with, it was our community. It’s sad. We called it home.” – Sharon Davis

Anne Liddiard

“If I win I’m satisfied but, if I don’t win, I’m also satisfied because I’ve had a night out with friends”

Susan Liddiard

“I started playing Bingo when I was sixteen and I’m sixty-three now. Four generations of our family went to Mecca Bingo. The men went to the British Lion and the women went to Bingo, then the women joined the men afterwards in the pub and they all went home at closing time.”