This map shows areas in the UK where photography is restricted by law as well as places where photography is often restricted even though there is no legal basis for doing so. You may often be able to photograph these places without any trouble at all, however, photographing in or around these areas may be subject to additional attention from bored security guards or police officers.
Section 76
Under s58a (more commonly known as s76) of the Terrorism Act 2000 it is an offence carrying a sentence of up to 10 years imprisonment:
a) To collect or possesses information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.
b) Possess a document or record containing information of that kind.
This is obviously a hugely wide ranging power with massive scope for abuse on the ground. The normal burden of proof is reversed so that the accused must prove that they had a reasonable excuse for having the information in their possession. The act also goes on to specifically include photographs.
While it is unlikely that a case against a photographer would ever make it to court to be accused of this crime by an officer on the ground can still be disruptive and threatening for photographers.
Previous to s76 there were very few laws restricting photography apart from in specified areas such as nuclear facilities, army bases and airports. However this new law means that taking a photograph of anything that may be of use to a terrorist such as a bus station or a ship could lead to arrest or at the least a stop and search.
The Official Secrets Act 1911
There are numerous areas that are considered prohibited places under s3 of the Official Secrets Act where it is illegal to collect, record, publish, or communicate to any other person photographs or information which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy. These include:
- Military establishments, munitions stores, aircraft and ships
- Civil Aviation property and naval dockyards
- Telephone exchanges and communications centres
The Secretary of State may also declare any railway, road, waterway, power station, waterworks, nuclear power station or any other place owned or being used by the state a prohibited place although nowhere currently is.
Bylaws
Some places have bylaws specifically forbidding photography without permission. Airports usually have a bylaw to this effect. Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square, and the Royal Parks all have bylaws that forbid photography for commercial purposes without a permit but allow amateurs. Generally speaking using a tripod is considered ‘commercial’ and anyone using one is usually swooped upon within seconds by heritage or park wardens.
Private Property
There are numerous places that may seem public, but are in fact private. Many town shopping centres are now privately owned and as such the property owners may set restrictions on photography. They may not have any displayed restrictions but you can be asked to leave the property immediately by the owners or their agents (security guards for example) without any reason.
Last Orders
This is by no means an exhaustive list or full discussion of the relevant legislation and does not cover the use of harassment, privacy laws or injunctions that are also used against photographers or the publication of photographs. If you can think of anything that we should add, leave a comment below.
Photography is banned at the National Photography museum Bradford ! i kid you not
i thought photography was banned in most museums anyway?
it’s the National Media Museum by the way
We had no problem taking photos at the British Museum earlier this month, though don’t know about other museums in London.
In the UK, most museums ban photography. In the USA, if you ask if it’s allowed – “Of course it is!” – they’re surprised that you even thought to ask.
To that effect, do not try and take photographs inside Topkapi Palace Museum, it will result in much shouting, seizure of equipment and forced deletion of photographs, and occasionally weapons being drawn and targeted at you.
Trust me on that one. They REALLY don’t want you to photographs their historic collection of Ottoman armour. In case you’re a terrorist, I guess. Just a really old school one.
That’s not true at all. In many museums photography is also not allowed in the US!
As a matter of fact, depending on where you go, you can even get harassed on the street for taking pictures… and I’m talking middle of the street.. not some army government secret location… Try going to LA and you’ll really change your perspective, specially with the advent of HDSLRs… they are going to start asking you for permits if you pull out one of those… haha!
The grass always looks greener on the other side…
T ; )~
The Google map doesn’t work properly
What exactly isn’t working?
We are aware of the issue of icons having an active area larger than the icon itself, this is due to the way custom icons are added to google maps – we’re trying to fix that.
As one who has work in a few national museums, I understand that the restrictions on photography in museums are based on: a) the deleterious effect of flash on the exhibits, and b) copyright issues.
There is no copyright on Michelangelo’s ceiling (in the Sistine Chapel) & most of the time, there’s enough lighting in museums & the like that there’s absolutely no need to use a flash. And yet, there are guards stationed throughout the building to prevent the use of photography within the Chapel! I think they’re just excuses for people who are being greedy with something that isn’t actually theirs.
The really funny part is that, with the advent of camera phones, there’s virtually no way to prevent people from taking those forbidden photos…
Actually the copyright is to the images that the museum/site of interest hold with their own ‘official’ merchandising. They make money from selling photos of their exhibits rather than the copyright on the exhibit itself. Witness the debacle with the National Portrait Gallery and Wikipedia
Misskity, problem is that you and I may well known that a flash is not need or no use, but 80% of the people who would go in there do not. So people that know how to use a camera get penalised by those that do not.
The Art Gallery in Birmingham allows photography and even flash, as long as you register at the reception to get a sticker, and agree to not use the images commercially. There are a couple of areas that you can’t take pictures, but these are marked clearly.
Seems reasonable to me.
All Licensed Nuclear Sites (including civil nuclear power stations, nuclear fuel processing plants and research laboratories) are Prohibited Places under the Official Secrets Act 1911, through the Nuclear Installations Act 1956 and subsequent Orders.
Many former Government buildings and offices are no longer automatically Prohibited Places, as they are no longer owned by the Crown, having been sold off to property developers, based in tax havens, and leased back to the UK government at premium, under former Chancellor Gordon Brown’s controversial Public / Private Finance Initiative schemes etc.
These include the Ministry of Defence HQ and HM Treasury in Whitehall, all HMRC tax offices, the Home Office in Marsham Street, the Ministry of Jutice in the re-developed former Home Office buildings in St. Anne’s Gate /Petty France, all the Identity and Passport Service passport and ID Card interview interrogation centres etc.
None of these Government building have, as yet, been declared to be Prohibited Places by a Secretary of State.
Have a look at http://www.secret-bases.co.uk/
He has surely lifted the lid on many places and all with clearance. He exposed how much was available and how pointlesss a lot of secrecy was in the UK.
Indeed, it’s a great resource, quite a few things on our map came from reading secret-bases.co.uk Finding the location of SOCA is an excellent piece of investigative journalism.
It is amazing just how much detail you can see of many of the “restricted” locations if you switch the map to satellite view and zoom in.
So just how far from a restricted location do you have to be before taking a photo becomes legal again?
Who’d want to go to America anyway ?
A security guard stopped me from taking photos of the KPMG building on the approach to City Hall (just off Tooley street). Shame as it’s fantastic modern architecture. Are they allowed to stop me?
RE the KPMG building; many global companies are sensitive about their office buildings because of the potential for terrorist action.
While the comments about Canary Wharf are true about it being private land, and one sees a lot of private security guards about, the management do seem at ease about photography. There are always people snapping the tall buildings with either compacts or DSLRs and no one seems to mind. Maybe there has been an outbreak of common sense amongst the Canary Wharf Management, who probably accept that photographers maybe capturing vital evidence should there be a terrorists attack on the day they were there.
I teach night photography in central London; however, I have had to stop taking my students on the South Bank opposite the Houses of Parliament (behind St Thomas Hospital), I have been told by the two police offers that stand there, that it is against the law to take a photograph of the Houses of Parliament without written permission. I did argue with them about taking a photograph; however, their threat of arresting me and my students was quite convincing. This has happened three times.
And as for security guards and the London eye; gosh they make you want to…
Reference taking photographs in museums.
I don’t know what the rules are for other museums but at the Science Musseum in London it is allowed as long as a tripod is not used for safety reasons.
i have never been stopped from taking photos in Manchester Science museum and photos are allowed in most of the war museum in manchester
Photography IS allowed in the National Media Museum – just not in the special exhibitions where photographers images are subject to copyright…..
The UK, unlike the Continent is really anal about photography. Photography is not allowed in most places indoors.
In London, there is no photography allowed in the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, St Pauls, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, all Greenwich museums, Windsor, the British Library, Soane Museum, Hunterian Museum, and dozens of other museums, castles and stately homes, private or public. If you say you won’t use flash, they’ll claim copyright. If you point out the objects are hundreds of years old, they’ll claim gift store. If you offer to buy something from the gift store, they’ll claim ‘they have no authority to authorise it’ and so on. However you counter their reasons, there’s always another one.
In Paris, most places allow personal non-flash photography e.g. the Louvre.
Germany & Brussels are fine with photography too. In the USA, it’s okay as well.
In Cambridge, there’s a quaint little artists’ house called Kettle Yard that charge a small fee of a few pounds for people to take photographs. Everyone’s happy.
I was stopped on a public street in Croyden for photographing a tram. Their opening gambit was ‘Did I have a permit to photograph there’. Permit from who? At the time I suspected that their main motive was that I was a token middle-aged white guy to help balance their ethnicity/age ratios (which the press has since suggested happens regularly). Allows them to harrass more young kids.
I frequently just use a compact super-zoom where feasible these days – long telephotos seem to freak them out whatever the subject.
I recently took a few pictures in Canary Wharf and as I entered the complex I asked a security guard if I could take some pictures. He said yes as long as I don’t take any of the reception areas inside buildings.
so with tripod up I took some early morning shots and then a little while later the guard came over to have a look at the shots in quite a friendly manner. He then got a question over his radio asking what I was photographing from his central control and he replied, ‘Some touristy pictures. Nothing to worry about.’ It seems common sense is prevailing in Canary Wharf.
I’ve also had a similar experience at Canary Wharf. If you just ask the guys on the barriers as you come in if you can take photos, they’re perfectly happy and usually very helpful. I totally agree as photographers we have the right to photograph pretty much everywhere in public and I know there are some aggressive police officers and security guards out there that don’t seem to fully understand our rights. But I have also seen photographers, on private property, get pretty militant with security guards as soon as they’re approached. If they had the slightest common sense to quickly ask permission first and just be generally polite to these people then there isn’t usually a problem.
A thought – if you have signed the official secrest act 1911 (and ammendments) can they still do a section 44 on you…. while you take photographs
The Official Secrets Act is a law covering everyone, there is no need to sign it to be governed by it. When people are asked to “Sign the Official Secrets Act” they are in fact just signing a reminder of what the Act entails to bring home the point.
I was in the Egyption museum in Cairo a number of years ago – it was packed full of tourists, there were various guards around and lots of ‘no photography’ signs.
Everyone had a camera though, I figured that if I literally pulled out my camera and blatantly took a photo with the flash turned on that by the time the guards turned around all they would see is dozens of tourists with cameras and have nobody to blame.
I was right and took several shots of the gold Tutankhamun mask and they had no idea who was taking the photos.
I was stopped from taking photos of the christmas decorations inside the West Quay Shopping Centre – Southampton.
Thank god for this website, it’s nice to know there are folks out there who are willing to stand up for our hobby.
Sorry to be a pedant, but the planes are at the airports; the tanks are on Salisbury Plain.
Otherwise, keep up the good work.
Hiya, Great Site !
I got stopped while taking photographs within St Davids Shopping Centre in Cardiff yesterday – dunno if you want to add it to your map ?
thanks.
The Newland Shopping Centre, Kettering you can’t take photos on these grounds i found this out when some other photographer for the evening telegraph with a camera 10 time smaller than nikon D90 was going round and asking some people some question and photographing them, so the security was called to sort this out and guess who they came up to and told off me because they thought because i had the bigger camera it was him then about 10 mins later they released they were wrong and at least they apologised but made sure i didn’t forget the rule of no taking photos. Stupid but oh well.
Would you please add Northern Ireland to your map, there are many places that photography is not allowed, photographers have and continue to be haressed by the police, security persons.
Prohibitions on photography are not new in the UK. Over 9 years ago I was stopped by private security guards at Canary Wharf from taking photos of buildings and they were none too pleasant about it. Also, around the same time I was told that I couldn’t use a tripod outside around what was the Royal Navy Hospital, Greenwich.
Over the years I have been stopped from photographing at numerous shopping centers, including the Whitgift in Croydon (at least 10 years ago) and in Lisbon last year.