Photographic rights and Exeter streets

UK Photographers Rights is an excellent and authoritative short guide, written by a British lawyer, "to the main legal restrictions on the right to take photographs and the right to publish photographs that have been taken". Alternatively, UK Photographers Rights, A Guide at Tog's Blog ("the thoughts and ramblings of a bitter and twisted press-photographer") gives the same information more robustly.
      I found these while reading around a minor local controversy here in Exeter: recent disputes about rights to photography in the newly developed Princesshay shopping quarter (whose architecture is highly photogenic) and Guildhall Centre. As the Express & Echo reports, security staff have accosted photographers - "Cameraman told, don't take shots in Princesshay", "New concern over photos being taken in the city", and so on - but the site managers deny there being a ban, saying only that permission is necessary (the issues, they say, are "safety and welfare of visitors", and "quite serious security implications" of "visitors taking photographs of shop frontages and staff"). A further complication is that the problem applies to only some of the streets in the development, the canopied ones that were the subject of a Walkways Agreement - see Princesshay is public, but only up to a point.
      Legally, this can't be argued with: landowners have the right to restrict photography. But it makes no intuitive sense in this case. Princesshay incorporates pre-existing street layouts that to all practical purposes function as public thoroughfares. Visitors in particular (Exeter is a popular tourist destination) can hardly be expected to know the legal fine print behind use of a street.
      My main other thoughts concern the silly assumptions behind the restrictions on photography, if the rationale is security. Photographers carrying SLR-format cameras seem to have been singled out for their visibility. This completely ignores the reality that high quality camera phones are now ubiquitous: anyone with a mobile could be taking a photograph under pretence of texting. Such large scope for clandestine photography really makes it pointless to pick on people with a big geeky camera openly taking photos.

Of course, security concerns in a provincial shopping centre are rather small beer compared to those in London, where there are buildings of major national importance and a history of terrorism. That said, there is still a spectrum between realistic concern and officiousness. Searching Amateur Photographer magazine for "rights" finds various interesting articles stemming from readers' reports of being apprehended for photographing London landmarks, and AP has strongly campaigned for photographers' rights. The politician Austin Mitchell, himself a keen photographer, has been highly supportive.