The floor doglegs to the right, where there are yet more tables, another smaller bar, and eventually a very large and well attended poker room.

Wandering down the centre of the gaming floor you eventually see the upper floors ahead, which have some function space and a not-very-often used VIP space – as usual in UK casinos, the bigger players (including all the well-off restaurant owners) generally like to play in sight of everyone else. The main bar is on your right, and on your left is the rather pleasant secluded slots area, with all up to date kit keyed in through a silky TITO payout system, all incentivised with the “Aspire” loyalty programme. Go in through this door and you’ll come past what appears to be an arcade, and then onto the very large main gaming floor. The Gate has been a huge success, being a pretty standard collection of leisure spots including a cinema, loads of bars on the ground floor and then restaurants on the first floor as well as the principle entrance to the casino. There are even two major entrances, one from the phenomenally successful “Gate” leisure complex, the other from Newcastle’s Stowell Street, which is home to about 15 Chinese restaurants – no mugs, these casino owners. The first of the very successful Aspers chain (successful that is, unless you count the eventual roadkill that was Swansea), Aspers Newcastle opened about 7 years ago, and did so on a huge scale, on three floors. Sitting at the pinnacle of the food chain, master of all it surveys, and quite capable of eating anything in its path (as it did with the ill-fated Bannatynes casino in Newcastle) is Aspers.

As today is international stretch a questionable metaphor day, I’m going to look at the vast untamed savannahs of the Newcastle casino landscape.

Aspers casino newcastle