Surveillance

Right: My Very Own CCTV Cameras!

“We live in a surveilled society” a British friend told me some years ago. I had already noticed the many signs in public places announcing the presence of CCTV, but because I’m from the States, and didn’t expect to see cameras everywhere I looked, I didn’t. But I’m starting to see them now, like the one I noticed only today outside my window.

Scientists who study human perceptions already know that we don’t so much see what’s actually in front of our eyes as we reference snapshots we’ve already taken, and if we missed a detail when we took our mental snapshot we may continue to miss it until it calls itself to our attention, at which time it pops onto our landscape and we take an amended shot for later reference. Leaving the philosophical ramifications of that for a much later discussion, that seems to be what happened when I looked out my window a few hundred times without seeing the camera. But it’s there, right there in the picture. Not surprising there’d be one outside a pub, I suppose.

Of course there’s closed-circuit surveillance in the U.S., too, it’s just not nearly as ubiquitous, and I suspect we give it even less thought. If we did think about it we’d have to go through some changes, American-style: first, we’d have to feel outrage at the intrusion into our privacy, then relief that someone was keeping their eye on those other guys. As a visitor here I don’t think much of it one way or another, really.

Meanwhile I do my own surveillance. Kennington Lane at 0700 is populated by dustmen and other early-risers, the traffic starting to pick up a bit from the relative quiet of the relative dark hours -- it’s never either dark or quiet in London. By 0830 the commuters are out in force, and the vans and lorries, and the pavements are populated by brisk walkers-to-the-dayjob and mums holding kids’ hands on the way to school. These have slacked off by 0900, and out comes Thistledown Lady to sweep her portion of the pavement. Thistledown lady lives over Kennington Lane and down a couple of doors in a neat little house with a neat little garden out front that blessedly missed the craze for paving over front gardens in the 60s and 70s. Her iron railings are covered with rose bushes, and she has a tiny patch of neatly-mown grass. She comes out every morning to sweep the pavement and tidy up the garden, dressed immaculately and neatly, her hair a white pouf that seems to have settled onto her head from above on some errant breeze from the nearest wigmaker’s shop.

On weekends the traffic consists of fewer cars and more tour busses from Wales and Yorkshire and France and Germany. I can’t imagine what the tour guide is finding to say as they pass through the modest borough of Lambeth, probably “Cheer up, folks – we’re less than a mile from the Houses of Parliament.”