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  Date / Time: 9/20/2009 6:44 PM UTC

  Waiter, there's a spy in my soup
  

  Last week, I went out with some friends after a party. We ended up in a restaurant in Marsham Street, central London, the heart of surveillance land. Nearby, there is a crossroads where I recently found myself late at night waiting for a cab and counting the cameras that watched the empty junction. I reached 28 by the time a cab arrived.

  The name of the restaurant was Osteria dell'angolo, which promises to bring a taste of Tuscany to the heart of London. Our party of 10 sat down and ordered. I looked round and saw that our table was being watched by three cameras.

  There is almost nothing that annoys me more than this kind of pointless blanket surveillance which paying customers are told is for their protection. I went outside to cool down, then returned to eat my salad. But the fuse was burning. I asked the waiter, then the manager, why we were being filmed. No answer was forthcoming, but eventually the manager muttered that Westminster city council insists that cameras are installed and switched on in his restaurant. I replied quite forcibly that I thought that this was rubbish, at which point he started talking about getting the police.

  During this exchange, I may have mentioned that if I had been photographing in his restaurant he would almost certainly have asked me to stop. I may also have speculated that Osteria dell'angolo would soon be introducing overhead microphones for the "safety of diners".  I paid the bill and returned to the table to tell my friends that I was leaving; they could stay and eat the second course, but I wasn't going to celebrate a novel about the surveillance state under the eye of three cameras.

  Rather to my surprise, they all left with me, which was embarrassing but also heartening. The evening was ruined and I felt responsible. But it turns out that I was technically right about one thing: the council does not insist on CCTV, although it supports pressure from the Metropolitan Police which "recommends that all businesses have CCTV because it acts as a deterrent and helps police solve minor crimes."

  There is an important issue here: while every kind of public body and private business feels able freely to photograph and record us, the public is being increasingly restricted in the use of cameras. A paper from the Manifesto Club by Pauline Hadaway, the director of a photography gallery called Belfast Exposed, makes a good point about the attack on what she calls citizen photography. "There has been a creeping restriction of everyday photography. This ranges from children being told that they can only take photos of particular parts of the body to sports clubs being told they should remove all photos of kids from their websites."

  The unofficial bans unearthed by her include photography of buildings because people may steal the design, airports and train stations for security reasons and children's Nativity plays because the pictures could be posted on the web. She writes: "Much of the contemporary paranoia around photography appears to be driven by vague suspicion rather than any real present danger."

  Interestingly, exactly that instinct is responsible for filling restaurants and pubs with CCTV in London. It is perhaps time for restaurant critics and guides to include information about CCTV in their reviews because, when it comes down to it, Osteria dell'angolo is bringing a taste of the Stasi, not Tuscany, to the heart of London.

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