Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit THERE are some rules which, however hard you try to look at them, leave you standing like an exasperated toddler: `But why not, mummy, why not?'
After a disappointing visit to the Mil- lennium Dome, one recent visitor had his day made for him by the stations along the new Jubilee Line. They seemed to have everything — elegance, gravitas and a sense of purpose — which the Dome itself lacked. Standing in the vast hall of one station, he innocently whipped out his camera and took a pho- tograph. Immediately he was set upon by security guards and told to put the camera away.
Flash photography, explains London Underground, can temporarily blind train drivers. Fair enough, if he had been on the platform, but since the photographer was in the ticket hall, it didn't seem to be much of an argument. `We do allow people to take long-expo- sure photographs without a flash,' says a LT spokesman, 'though you can only use a tripod under supervision from a member of staff because it could create a tripping hazard for passengers.'
It's not just the London Under- ground, either. Visitors to Buckingham Palace have been reprimanded for attempting to take a seemingly harm- less snap of their families in regal sur- roundings. 'No photography? It's just a policy we have,' says a spokesman. 'If people want photographs, there are plenty of postcards on sale.' In other words, photography just sounds as if it is something which ought to be banned, and so it is. We are now in the bizarre situation where anyone with an Internet connection can obtain aerial pho- tographs of nuclear bases — and yet take your camera out in one of Lon- don's top tourist attractions and you'll be cast out on to the street.
Ross Clark
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