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Walk across Westminster Bridge, or wander into the British Museum on a wet Saturday, and you are actually standing on ground that was first paid for by a gamble. Quite a few of them really. For the best part of three centuries the English state paid for things it could not otherwise afford by selling people a paper-thin chance of getting rich, and the habit never truly went away, it just kept moving house, from the west door of a cathedral to the lottery offices of Georgian London, then the corner shop, and now the mobile casino on the phone in your pocket. Here's how that happened.

Elizabeth's big idea

In 1567 Elizabeth I had a really practical problem. The havens of England were in a sorry state and the crown did not have the cash to fix them, so somebody at court came up with a totally mad sounding scheme. Sell 400,000 lots at ten shillings each, all over the country, and put the money towards the "reparation of the havens and strength of the Realme". The prizes were a whopping mix of ready money, silver plate, wall hangings and good linen, and as an extra sweetener anybody who bought in was promised a short spell of freedom from arrest, unless they had done something properly serious like murder, piracy or treason. Imagine that on a ticket today!

It flopped, honestly. Ten shillings was a lot of money in the 1560s, and fewer than one in twelve of the lots ever got sold, even after the sales period was dragged out and towns were leaned on. The draw finally started on 11 January 1569 outside the west door of old St Paul's and by most accounts it went on for months, with every prize cut right down to match. Not a great start. But the idea stuck, and it held the potential to raise far more than anyone at court first guessed.

A tailor, half a crown and a colony

The next famous one had a twist, because it was for a settlement across the Atlantic. In 1612 James I let the Virginia Company of London run a lottery to keep the struggling Jamestown colony afloat, and the big prize that summer went to a London tailor called Thomas Sharplisse, who had paid two shillings and sixpence for his ticket and walked away with 4,000 crowns in plate. Not bad for half a crown! The company's lotteries carried on until complaints in Parliament saw them stopped in 1621. Funny thought, a slice of early America paid for by Londoners having a flutter.

Bridges, museums and sixteenths of a ticket

By the 18th century the state lottery was really part of the furniture. Lotteries in the late 1730s raised money towards the first Westminster Bridge, which opened in 1750 after the funds came up short and had to be topped up, and in 1753 the very Act that created the British Museum also set up a lottery to buy Sir Hans Sloane's collection and a house in Bloomsbury to keep it in. So when you queue up to see the Rosetta Stone, you may possibly be thanking a few thousand Georgian ticket buyers who never won a penny.

A whole ticket cost more than most working people could find, so lottery offices chopped them into halves, quarters, eighths and sixteenths, and printers churned out handbills by the cartload promising that this draw, this time, would be the lucky one. Sound familiar?

The honest bit: why it all stopped

It would be nice to say everyone loved it. They definitely did not. Reformers saw the lottery as a tax on the poor and a sure way to ruin a household, and there were scandals too, the British Museum lottery itself ended in a fraud case against a Treasury official who ran it. By the 1820s the mood had turned for good, and the last English state lottery was drawn at Coopers' Hall on 18 October 1826. For nearly 170 years after that, Britain simply did without one.

The comeback, and where the flutter lives now

Then on 19 November 1994 Noel Edmonds hosted the first draw of the National Lottery live on the BBC, and millions tuned in. The money went to good causes, heritage among them, which is a really neat echo of those Elizabethan harbours if you think about it.

Thirty years on, most of that old flutter has moved onto the phone. The same itch that sent Tudor families to St Paul's now gets scratched on a train or on the sofa, in a minute or two. A mobile casino like Fortune Mobile Casino runs slots, scratch cards, instant wins and live roulette straight from a smartphone browser, and you can even put a deposit on your phone bill, which is a long, long way from writing your name and a Bible verse on a paper slip in 1567. The speed is new. The instinct is the same old one.

Those old reformers did get one thing right, a flutter only stays fun when it has a ceiling on it. Every mobile casino licensed in the UK, Fortune Mobile Casino included, lets you set deposit limits and take a break, and it is really worth doing before you start. One ticket for the Friday draw, not forty. Do that and you stand a chance to keep it what it was always meant to be, a bit of fun!

History's longest running flutter

So next time you cross Westminster Bridge, spare a thought for the Tudor merchant scribbling his little motto on a lot, the London tailor with his half-crown ticket, and the Georgian maid scraping her wages together for a sixteenth share. The lottery built bits of Britain you can still touch. The paper slips are gone and the cathedral steps are gone, but that same small hope keeps turning up in whatever people carry around. Today it is a phone. Who knows what it is next!

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