Yes. One of the two obvious "missing" themes in Las Vegas is a resort based on the city of London (the other major theme-that-nearly-but-never-was being San Francisco). With all its famous landmarks, history, and ties with the U.S., you’d think a London casino would be a natural -- right up there with New York, Paris and Venice - and London’s marked absence from the Las Vegas skyline is certainly not through lack of trying.
Plans for a London-themed megaresort have been floating around for years, earmarked for several different Strip locales. The most recent to have any legs was intended for the old El Rancho property on the north Strip, announced when the shuttered and derelict casino was finally bought by Florida-based condo developers Turnberry Associates. After the casino was imploded in October 2000, plans were drawn up for a 2,047-room hotel and 90,000-square-foot casino revolving around replicas of the Big Ben clock tower (which was going to be even taller than the 320-foot original) and Tower Bridge (the one on which bloodthirsty monarchs like Henry VIII used to display the heads of beheaded traitors, and which oil millionaire Robert P. McCulloch allegedly thought he was getting when he bought London Bridge and shipped it out to Lake Havasu in the late ‘60s). The developers hired a former president of Bally’s and Paris-Las Vegas to run the show, and got as far as filing the plans with the Clark County Planning Commission -- but no further. No official explanation was ever given for the project’s demise, but rumor had it that Turnberry’s lack of prior experience in the gaming industry was foreseen as a future stumbling block.
By a strange coincidence, at virtually the same time, plans for another jolly-old-London casino were announced, this time destined for a big plot at the opposite end of the Strip. In February 2001, a group of Las Vegas real-estate developers calling themselves New World LLC put together a 77-acre parcel of land on the east side of the Strip across from Mandalay Bay, stretching from Hacienda Avenue to Russell Road (and wrapping around three motels and a shopping plaza that refused to sell). This group had plans to construct no fewer than three megaresorts on the plot, and approached Richard Branson, the English billionaire chairman of Virgin Atlantic Airlines, as a possible partner. Even more ambitious than the Turnberry project, this "London" would not only feature Big Ben and Tower Bridge, but also replicas of the Royal Albert Hall and the London Eye millennial Ferris wheel. Since the original Eye is owned and operated by Branson’s arch-enemy British Airways, it’s perhaps no surprise that his involvement was not secured. Ultimately, the grandiose project failed to attract enough investment capital to get off the ground.
So there’s been no London-themed casino yet. However, one small London-esque casino has made it off the drawing board to date. It’s the London Club casino-within-a-casino at the Aladdin. While the attempt to introduce the sophisticated and exclusive air of a European-style "salon" casino onto the Las Vegas Strip didn’t catch on, the London Club continues to operate (with vastly scaled-down expectations) on the second floor of the Aladdin.
