Locks and Security News: your weekly locks and security industry newsletter
4th December 2024 Issue no. 732
Your industry news - first
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Top 10 most surveilled areas in the UK revealed - 9 of them are in London
Interested in discovering which cities, towns, and boroughs had the most amount of CCTV cameras relative to their size, domestic and commercial security providers Expert Security UK put in Freedom of Information (FOI) requests with 425 councils in the UK asking how many CCTV cameras were run by them.
291 of them responded, with this amount then being used to calculate how many CCTV cameras per square mile each area had. While it was expected that some locations in London would make the top 10, what wasn’t expected was that they would make up close to the entirety of the list:
- City of London - 1,414 cameras per square mile
- London Borough of Hackney - 415 cameras per square mile
- London Borough of Lambeth - 89 cameras per square mile
- London Borough of Tower Hamlets - 50 cameras per square mile
- London Borough of Southwark - 46 cameras per square mile
- London Borough of Ealing - 43 cameras per square mile
- London Borough of Camden - 42 cameras per square mile
- Lincoln City Council - 34 cameras per square mile
- Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames - 33 cameras per square mile
- London Borough of Haringey - 33 cameras per square mile
As we can see, Lincoln is the only area within the top 10 that isn’t a part of Greater London, only just making the cut and beating out Kingston upon Thames and Haringey by 1 camera per square mile.
However, one of the most interesting takeaways is the huge disparity between first, second, and third place. City of London leading by such a large margin makes sense when you consider that it’s one of the smallest areas to have its own council and is the heart of the capital city, so it’s only natural that it would have an extreme CCTV presence.
One place below and 999 cameras fewer is Hackney, which is worth mentioning actually had the highest number of CCTV cameras overall with 3,056 - almost double the amount of those in the City of London - however it missed out on the top spot on this list thanks to the larger area being covered.
There’s then another huge drop from second to third, with Lambeth having 326 fewer cameras per square mile than Hackney due to having not even having a third of the total number of CCTV cameras that Hackney does AND operating them over a larger area.
From fourth place onwards, the numbers become steadier as you move down the list, with only the top 3 being the main outliers. However even with the values becoming more stable it’s still areas of Greater London that dominate the list thanks to a combination of large amounts of cameras and much smaller area sizes than the majority of non-city councils. This is also how Lincoln managed to break the mould and see itself sit in the middle of the London Boroughs - a strong investment in CCTV over a smaller council area.
30th October 2024