The city of Lincoln has more council-owned CCTV cameras per square mile than any other that isn’t part of London.
Expert Security UK put in freedom of information 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.
As you may expect the City of London came out on top with an astonishing 1,414 cameras per square mile, followed by various other London boroughs.
The first non-London location came in the form of Lincoln, with 34 CCTV cameras per square mile to make it the most watched location outside of the capital.
Here’s the full list of the top 10 (excluding London):
- Lincoln – 34 cameras per square mile
- Sandwell – 32 cameras per square mile
- Woking – 29 cameras per square mile
- Cambridge – 26 cameras per square mile
- Stoke-on-Trent – 21 cameras per square mile
- Belfast – 20 cameras per square mile
- Leicester – 20 cameras per square mile
- Wirral – 20 cameras per square mile
- Runnymede – 19 cameras per square mile
- North Tyneside – 19 cameras per square mile
Following on from Lincoln we have the borough of Sandwell in the West Midlands, which takes second place thanks to its heavy investment into CCTV for the six towns located within it, such as West Bromwich and Wednesbury.
Woking came third due its large number of cameras spread over a relatively small area, with nearly 600 of the over 700 cameras reported being used to keep watch over car parks, according to the council’s website.
Fourth and fifth place went to Cambridge and Stoke-on-Trent respectively, while Belfast, Leicester, and Wirral took the next three spots with 20 cameras per square mile each. Interestingly Belfast is the only area outside of England to enter the top 10, which can mostly be attributed to many of the councils in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland covering larger areas of land than the majority of those in England.
Not only that, but Belfast also had the third highest number of CCTV cameras outside of London overall with 1,032, only behind Sandwell with 1,054 and North Lanarkshire with 1,378 (thanks to the large numbers of towns and villages in the region).
The final two locations also tie, though this time with 19 cameras per square mile each it’s Runnymede and North Tyneside, two areas of similar sizes with similar amounts of CCTV cameras present. Runnymede has a large amount of CCTV as part of its “Safer Runnymede” scheme which sees CCTV in every town and village within its borders. While North Tyneside has CCTV installed at many of the parks and beauty spots in the area along with larger towns like South Shields falling under the council.
While this top ten does feature a couple of areas that are in relatively close proximity to London, the lack of a North/South divide when it comes to CCTV levels is positive to see, and that areas across the country are getting the security infrastructure they need.
Locations in Scotland and Wales may not have made it, but that’s not due to them having a lack of CCTV cameras, rather the larger areas that these councils tend to cover that often contain small villages or expanses of natural areas that may not necessarily require cameras.
Photo by matthew Feeney on Unsplash
