The Hippodrome Bingo in Bishiop Auckland will be celebrating its 100th Birthday of the building over the next few weeks.  The Bingo club was purpose built as a theatre in 1909 at a cost of £10,000. Although it was built as a theatre, in 1920 it was renamed as the Hippodrome Picture House becoming a full time cinema.  It stayed as the Hippodrome Picture House up until 1947 when it was taken over by a cinema chain known as Essoldo and subsequently changed the name from Hippodrome to Essoldo and remained with the group as a cinema until 1966.

In 1966 the Essoldo was transformed into Lucky bingo 7 and ran by the group for 13 years until its sale to a major bingo chain known as Ladbrokes.  This was a time when major bingo brands were expanding and bingo was becoming big business and this also seen the emergence of Top Rank.  Top Rank took the bingo club over from Ladbrokes a year later in 1980 and eventually carried through the Mecca Bingo Brand in the 1990s.

During the late 1990s, the Mecca Bingo club chose to offload a few of their smaller clubs to independent operators.  A former employee of Mecca Bingo decided to purchase the Mecca Club but had to change the name.  Appropiately he decided to revert the club back to a former name and the Hippodrome bingo club was reborn.

The independent bingo operator ran the club for a number of years with minimal investment and the club became very tired in need of repair and substantial investment and looked at the options of reinvesting or selling the club on.

In 2003, a medium sized independent bingo chain known as Seldis Cooper Purchased the club and invested heavily in the building and made considerable changes to the bingo club.  All the bingo equipment was upgraded to a very high specification and the popularity of the bingo club in the surrounding area has more than doubled.

Hippodrome Bingo club is one of the most successful bingo clubs in the Northe East and is still continuing to increase its membership base in a declining and more competitive market.