Say "Cheese"...

Bedford Market - St Pauls Square

Bedford Market overspill - Harpur Street

Apparently UK citizens are one of the most watched people in the world.

We have the UK's Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, warning that the country has become a "surveillance society"^Note.
And we have a Deputy Chief Constable (even!) saying that valuable resources are being wasted on spy cameras^Note.
Seems like there's something in the order of four million CCTV cameras in Britain, giving people a chance of being caught on film a staggering 300 times a day!

So I thought I'd do a little bit of research for myself. Took a wander down Bedford (my nearest local town) High Street to see if I could spot just how many CCTV cameras had been installed.

Now you've got to bear in mind that Bedford is a fairly small East Midlands (some would say Southern but, being a true Southerner, I'd argue with that. And even the AA agrees with me - or used to, anyway) market town, one-time county town of Bedfordshire, some forty-odd miles north of London.

Its High Street, end to end, is perhaps about a third of a mile in length (I've not precisely measured it, but that's a fairly good estimate I'd suggest) - it takes me perhaps five to seven minutes to walk its entire length. At a leisurely stroll!

Bedford High Street facing south

Bedford High Street facing north

And lo and behold, what do I find? No less than thirteen cameras. Nor is that allowing for the ones I may have missed. After all, I didn't want to make my sortie too conspicuous, especially as I was photographing each one (the pics here only being a representative sample).

Admittedly many of these are privately operated. The majority appear to be installed by, and so that they oversee, licensed premises (pubs!). According to a close friend of mine who happens to be in the licensed trade its a local Council requirement that the entrances to licensed premises on Bedford High Street be monitored by CCTV.
Indeed, I only managed to spot one that was clearly not being operated by a public house. And curiously, I couldn't see any near the entrances to banks (the obvious location for CCTV one would have thought).
Presumably their cameras (for without doubt they deploy them) are concealed - even more worrying!

However, whether a given CCTV camera is operated by a local authority or a commercial enterprise is really beside the point. The real point is that as a country we seem somehow to have accepted the notion of photographic surveillance and take it as the "norm".

Even I, a long-time staunch supporter of civil rights and personal privacy issues, had not been much exercised by this trend - until now. Like most people I suppose, I'd seen them but not really noticed them. Where did they all spring from? When were they put up? Was it all within the same time-frame or spread over a period of months, or even years?
I simply don't know. But what I do know is, there suddenly seems to be a helluva lot of them, and they're all over the place.

So, I have to ask myself, how do I feel about being spied upon? For that's what it amounts to.
Whilst at the present time and on a case-by-case basis one could probably argue the benefits of each installation, its their apparently unchecked proliferation that I find most disturbing.

And I suspect that if one were to put those "benefits" under a microscope they simply wouldn't withstand the scrutiny. But that'll be the topic for another rant. All I'm simply doing here is to report the findings of my initial, and very cursory, exploration.

What I'd like you to do is take a stroll down your High Street, and see just how many cameras you can spot. And then extend that journey of discovery to the rest of your town (as I fully intend to do in due course).

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