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.
