Known as the crack cocaine of gambling

"That'll give you some money to buy nappies," Annie Sheffield, the shop's manager says, laughing. She knows her regular customers well and Naseem comes in a few times every day. Last week he announced he had had a baby. He has described himself as a car salesman, but Annie doesn't think he has a job, remarking drily when he has gone: "Unless he works at night, when we're closed." Naseem doesn't laugh at the mention of nappies and rushes to the door. "I'm lucky to get out of here, lucky to get it back," he says, one foot outside the door, anxious not to linger. "You always end up putting it in. It will always take more from you. You never win." He thinks he has probably lost ￡270 on the machines over the past week.

Known as the crack cocaine of gambling, these roulette machines have attracted new interest this year after research showed there was a far higher number of the terminals in poor areas of high unemployment than on richer high streets. The Fairer Gambling research showed that in the 50 parliamentary constituencies with the highest numbers of unemployed people, there were 1,251 betting shops, and punters gambled ￡5.6bn into the fixed-odd betting terminals the industry term for the high-speed roulette machines, often abbreviated to FOBTs every year. By comparison, the 50 constituencies with the lowest levels of unemployment only had 287 betting shops, with 1,045 terminals a maximum of four terminals is allowed in each shop under the 2005 Gambling Act and only ￡1.4bn was gambled on them. Overall, ￡40bn was staked in the year to March 2012.The study showed that more than ￡150m was spent on betting machines in Slough last year, the highest amount in the south-east. It also showed that Slough had 28 betting shops with 102 of the roulette terminals, more than in any other constituency in the south-east.

Slough's population has changed dramatically over the past two decades, so that there is a much higher proportion of people from eastern Europe, Pakistan and India. There is a stark generational and racial divide in the betting shop. Throughout the day the seats in front of the bank of flat-screen televisions, which are broadcasting live from the dog tracks and the horse races, are occupied by older men, mostly white, drinking cups of tea and passing the time of day as they make small bets on the races. The men who come to play the roulette machines are younger, eastern European and Asian. This reflects the British Gambling Prevalence Survey's 2010 findings that problem gamblers were more likely to be Asian or British Asian, to be younger adults, more likely to be unemployed and in poor health. Only one woman comes into the shop while I'm there, and she looks as if she is accompanying a friend and doesn't spend anything.