Laws on Street Photograhy in London

I hate January. I have hated January for as long as I have known it. When I was a child it used to feel like a dreadful come down after a climactic New Year. For the last six years I have been spending the start of the year in a house on top of a hill somewhere close to Swansea. Old friends gather around an open fire, we open the blind and into the distance between two valleys there are fireworks, and even the odd Chinese lantern floating towards an ominously dark wood on top of one of the hills. Good food, great company and a plentiful supply of beverages; so when time comes to descend into the murky and what would probably be dreary days during the rest of January, I find life to be a slightly uphill struggle. Had it not been for the regular need to keep LawNewsIndex going, I suspect I would not want to be back at work!

On the first Saturday of the year I found myself in London with two hours to kill before a Jazz concert at the Polish Cultural Centre close to Hammersmith. The sun had just set and the city almost quiet close to Trafalgar Square. Cartier-Bresson style street photography had always been more of an ambition than intention that I had frequently indulged in. So many horror stories about photographers being harassed by security guards at private establishments as well as the sheer audacity to shoot in the middle of the road with a 35mm lens; none of these daunted me much this evening probably because there was precious little else to do. The law remains that an individual can shoot anything standing on what is considered to be public grounds. Wikipedia has a very basic guideline for photographing in Lond on.

Here are my attempts at trying to be William Klein -