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MANCHESTER, ENGLAND-Manchester has won the right to host Britain's first regional casino. A five-person Casino Advisory Panel picked the city in northwest England from a list of seven cities that also included Blackpool, London and Glasgow.

The casino complex will be located on the east side of the city, around facilities built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Preliminary development plans call for a 54,000-sf casino with 1,250 slot machines.

Manchester city officials are expected to solicit development and management proposals from major casino operators. Published reports out of the UK have listed a group led by Kerzner International as the likely partner.

The decision, which must be affirmed by lawmakers, follows the government's relaxation of decades-old curbs on casino gaming. The goal is to spur employment, tourism and investment in the poor areas of Britain. Unemployment in Manchester, a city of 2.6 million people, is about 4%.

"Manchester represents a good place to test social impact, and the council's consultations with other local authorities and relevant bodies gave us confidence on that," says Stephen Crow, chair of the advisory panel, in a prepared statement. "Manchester has a catchment area for a casino second only to that of London, and it is an area in need of regeneration at least as much as any of the others we observed--indeed, the city has the greatest need in terms of multiple deprivation of all the proposals that were before us."

There are currently 138 casinos operating in Britain under the current law, which was enacted in 1968. The casinos generated around 14 million visits last year. The Gambling Act of 2005 was passed in April 2005 and takes effect this September.

In addition to the regional casino planned for Manchester, the Casino Advisory Panel has recommended locations for eight large (up to 43,000 sf) and eight small casinos. The large casino cities--places where the casinos can be as large as 43,000 sf--are Great Yarmouth, Kingston-upon-Hull, Leeds, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, Newham, Solihull and Southamptoncan. The small casino cities recommended were Bath and North East Somerset; Dumfries and Galloway; East Lindsey; Luton; Scarborough; Swansea; Torbay and Wolverhampton.

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