Insert coin: the virtual reality arcades regenerating northern high streets
O n Bishop Auckland’s increasingly desolate high street, shops have steadily closed over the years as a retail park has lured local people away. Dozens of shopfronts lie empty, and the businesses that cling on are mostly discount retailers, the odd vape shop and a few charity shops. Even Poundland has gone. But a few doors down from where Boots used to be, next to the HSBC branch that closed last August, you can now find yourself at the starting grid of a Formula One race, then hurled down a towering rollercoaster.
On average, 47 shops shut down every day last year across the UK – up nearly 50% on 2021 – as retailers faced ever-increasing competition from online stores along with rising costs and damage from the pandemic. The future for these streets is not retail but entertainment, and The Gaming Hideaway in Bishop Auckland, a virtual reality arcade, is a prime example.
Husband and wife team Kaiyn and Rachel Crooks now run two venues after taking the plunge during the Covid pandemic. Rachel had been running a cleaning business when the first lockdown hit. “In one day we lost more than 300 customers,” she says. Kaiyn had been working as a rope-access specialist, and decided to join her in launching The Gaming Hideaway. “It wasn’t meant to be the beast that it is,” he says. “It was meant to be a vintage thing, and we were going to do Sega Mega Drives and have Sonic the Hedgehogand Pac-Man arcade [machines].” But after Rachel did some research into VR, they decided it was a much better fit.
Arcades entered a long decline in the early 2000s as the graphics on home consoles improved, but VR has made them cutting-edge again. As well as offering VR gaming on PlayStations and Xboxes, some of The Gaming Hideaway’s machines are
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