Portsmouth's 'Secret' Casino - Mar 09

After very hastily organising, visited with Dee and my flatmate Jim.

I'm only calling this a 'secret' casino as I never heard of there being one in this complex before another explorer found some evidence on some floor plans found in Time/Envy (mucho thanks for the info, you know who you are ). I don't ever remember seeing any advertisements, promotional material, even any signage for it when the place was open. I've spoken to a few people who used to frequent the clubs in it's heyday and got a resounding "What, there was a casino?!?" . There is certainly *nothing* internal to indicate it's existance, and the (internal) path to it looks like nothing more than an entrance to a cupboard.

Although I revisited the entire site as I recently posted a report of time/envy i'll just post the casino, full pics can be seen on flickr linked to at the end.

View from the front:


Once in, heading in the general direction we thought the casino was, headed into what looked like a cupboard and through a series of confusing and decidedly non-casino looking areas we found ourselves slap bang in front of it.
Lobby area:







Moving on down to the casino floor which was pretty flooded:





Kitchen area:






And finally - Dee the magician:


Full set (including the nightclubs) on Flickr

Excellent stuff mate! Good to see the druggies have gone and you were able to do the underground section that I never it to thanks to the places' inhabitants at the time. I guess I'm not surprised at it being flooded, it's below sea level!

Carpet...

That is a spectacularly ugly carpet!

The internal entrance was not used by customers - nor was it ever advertised as it was not the same company (only the same parent company previously).

The actual entrance was at the back from the car park, although signage did feature on the front between the two blue facias on your picture. So it was Time - Grosvenor - Envy.

I believe the internal entrance was used when 5th Avenue and Grosvenor had the same parent company (Rank) until 5th Avenue was sold off. At some point 5th Avenue was closed, refurbished and reopened as Time.

Trust me - most people knew about this casino as it was only one of 2 Grosvenor casinos in Portsmouth & Southsea.

Hope this makes sense?

wow, fascinating, im from portsmouth and i love seeing all these things you would never get to see otherwise.

Tiberius / Grosvenor casino's

Well done for finding it, most of the gueses were quite accurate, being an ex-employee way back when Pleasurama owned the whole block the actual casino entrance was at the back and the front, (the back for the more big spender to enter and feel important) and it was originally called "Tiberius Casino".

The smaller bar known as "Envy" was originally called "Images", I DJ'd there once or twice and I have a full set of perfect 5th Ave and Imgages photos.

Hope that cleared a few things up.

This is facinating though, brilliant stuff well done.