While it's no doubt true that the "vast majority" of CCTV in the UK is privately owned (pretty much every business premises will operate their own private CCTV), there are large numbers of police, local-government, and transport-agency operated CCTV cameras monitoring public spaces in the UK.

If you look at somewhere like London, then pretty much every busy intersection, every public square, every station, every bus, every train, etc has CCTV.

In 2002 there were estimated to be 500,000 public and private CCTV cameras in Greater London, and 4.2 million in the UK. That number is almost certainly much higher today.

> If you look at somewhere like London, then pretty much every busy intersection, every public square, every station, every bus, every train, etc has CCTV.

My experience as a londoner is that privately or quasiprivately operated spaces (including trains and buses) and roads do but public spaces like squares or parks don't. When I was mugged in a plaza there was no public CCTV coverage but the police requested CCTV footage from a private gym bordering the plaza. I think that's pretty normal for london.

It was estimated that high, but using a flawed extrapolation from observations on just two streets in Putney:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080704145855/http://www.channel...

I'd be interested to know the source of your (almost) certainty.