The betting shop in Sunderland that’s a living piece of art
In March 2022, a piece of art that looked like a betting shop opened on High Street West in Sunderland.
(Credits: Ryan Gander / National Glass Centre / George Darrell)
This is nothing new, to be clear – this gives High Street West something in common with basically every single high street in the United Kingdom, and it’s not the only one on the street that runs parallel to the River Wear, but all you have to do is take one cursory look and see that many things about this betting shop set it apart from all the rest. It’s abandoned, for a start. Strange for a place that could only be four years old, and perverse as it seems, times of economic hardship are often boom times for the betting industry.
Yet it’s true. The first thing you’ll see in the window is a To Let sign from a company called Lofthouse Mortgages. A closer look will see a floor strewn with crumpled up betting slips, discarded pens, sweet rappers and a pile of unread mail collecting at the front door. The door is obviously locked, and no matter how long you look through the window, you won’t see anyone actually working there. Which leads to the second strange thing about the betting shop.
There are no sponsors or corporate logos anywhere – in fact, it’s quite easy to miss that it’s a betting shop at all until you look a little closer, that’s when you’ll see the signs set up for the greyhounds, the football, Formula One, the roulette machine set up in the corner, a giant mural of a horse and jockey on one of the walls, yet all of it is still easy to miss on first glance due to the sheer lack of colour anywhere.
The reason for this is the ultimate thing that makes it stand out. Everything inside it is made of glass.
(Credits: Ryan Gander / National Glass Centre / George Darrell)
Why is there a glass betting shop in Sunderland?
I do mean everything as well. The roulette machine? Glass. The post on the floor? Glass. The crumpled-up betting slips? Yep, glass too. The potted plant drooping over an errant table? Take a wild guess. Even the fire extinguishers tucked away in the corner are made of glass. The only colour anywhere in the room is the grey etching on said glass that makes any words or images. Other than that, anything that isn’t a wall is glass, with absolutely no exceptions.
So obviously, it’s not and never was a functioning betting shop, so what is it? It’s actually a piece of art called Ghost Shop. It’s the work of Ryan Gander in collaboration with glassmaker James Maskrey, working together for a new National Glass Centre exhibition. Gander was one of four British artists that the NGC contacted to make glass art installations in collaboration with their glassmakers. For his piece, he decided to turn an abandoned tanning salon in the middle of Sunderland into a comment on how we look past the most obvious signs of societal decay.
Speaking to The Guardian, Gander said, “We see betting shops, but they are kind of invisible because we pay no attention to them. They just become deleted from our awareness. We cancel out other people’s problems with addictions… we just blank these things out. We make them transparent.” Ghost Shop stood for five months until September 2022, and one wonders what it was replaced with.
Given the way things are going now, I wouldn’t rule out an actual betting shop.
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