As if it’s not complicated enough to secure a sports stadium, town hall, or shopping centre, often a site has more than one, maybe multiple, sorts of users – local government, healthcare, retail, residential. How to manage the different users and visitors, each with valid needs and rights of access? Mark Rowe asks.
In south London, a Lambeth Council site at Brixton Hill was highly commended by the police scheme Secured by Design, for how it’s ‘designed out’ crime. Besides residential blocks, the new development has retail; and on the ground floor and basement the council’s archives department (that the public can visit five days a week). The Met Police designing out crime officer (DOCO) recalled for the entry into the annual awards how a meeting at the site office covered access controls. The DOCO had spotted that as the plans stood, someone with ‘back of house’ access to the retail unit could abuse that freedom of movement through a fire door, which would then allow them into the residential core above. This was due to a shared fire escape route that could not be redesigned. To mitigate the risk, the DOCO suggested that if the fire door was alarmed with a local alarm on the door, and alarms in the residential core, then such an intruder could not use the door covertly, and building managers would be aware of a potential breech. Also agreed to was extra CCTV cameras, sited on both sides of the door.
You could argue that in ‘the good old days’, life and the work of a DOCO was simpler – a sports stadium was not also a hotel; a railway station or airport was a railway station or airport and not a shopping mall also; a mall was a mall without a public library, a library (or a town hall) didn’t have a police base, and so on. Except that dual use has always happened. As for gift shops in cathedrals (and such commerce in museums and art galleries) Jesus in Jerusalem went into the temple and drove out the traders [Luke 19: 45-46] saying: “Scripture says ‘my house shall be a house of prayer’, but you have made it a robbers’ cave.” When Edward I and the other kings of medieval England built the famous concentric castles in Wales and settled English people inside, those settlements also had to hold markets; the castles by the coast were also ports, while the walls kept out the hostile native Welsh.
Buildings and sites are dual or multi-use for good reasons. At a transport hub passengers may have time to spare; why not have a meal, or do some shopping? Even though that brings complicating traffic (supplies in, waste out). Even before the covid pandemic prompted changes in white-collar commuting, online retail meant high streets and shopping malls had empty premises – why not bring in police ‘hubs’, or public libraries? Police, and local government, have their own problems of making ends meet and may equally welcome down-sizing into smaller, while new, premises, that already have a footfall and car parking and that may be sited more conveniently for the public. Why go to the trouble and expense of retro-fitting a building when you can rent something newer, and built for your purpose? Hence so many of the Debenhams department stores are still empty, after the retailer went out of (physical world) business at the end of 2020. An exception is in Gloucester (pictured) where Morgan Sindall, that did that Lambeth Council development, are at work on turning the building into a city campus for the University of Gloucestershire, (pictured from Kings Square), besides a public library, café and art space, and health and well-being centre.
To give two other examples of many: in York, the football stadium on the edge of town, featured in the March edition of Professional Security magazine, has some hospital outpatient services, and a leisure centre including swimming pools; in Barnsley, the council earlier this year announced it’s making a health and well-being hub in the Alhambra shopping centre; The Glass Works shopping centre in town houses the public library; and has had an ‘NHS Community Diagnostic Centre’ since 2022, for taking blood samples, doing ultrasound scans and the like.
It does mean, however, that various people with different access control rights need to be managed; and by time, as well as geography. Cleaners will need access, but only when they are supposed to be at work. The public is welcome into a café, in opening hours; but not back of house, at any time. Delivery van drivers need to be back of house to drop off supplies, but not have access to the staff rest room and lockers.
Further complicating security of premises is change of use, or an event that demands more security than usual, such as a sports fixture that will fill the arena and the attached hotel. Even large sites such as a Commonwealth Games can ‘lock down’ in advance, and be pronounced secure, so that if anyone – a protest movement or even someone mentally unwell – makes a hoax bomb threat, the site organisers can have confidence that the threat is indeed a hoax and can be ignored. Again, that does require strict control of access.
What next? Maybe drones that require take-off and landing rights? At the University of East Anglia (UEA), on the outskirts of Norwich, UEA’s estates department is cooperating with Norfolk Police on trials of ‘first responder’ drones. The UK’s police are using about 400 drones, which works out at several per force. As the drone has to, under civil aviation rules, have a human operator that works within ‘visual lines of sight’ (VLOS) – in other words, the pilot mustn’t lose sight of the vehicle – that implies deployment out of a car boot, and the drone stored in a box. The potential, if drones can be allowed to fly remotely, ‘beyond visual line of sight’, is that the police (or fire brigade or coastguard) have drones in weather-proof boxes, and in response to say, a missing person, the drone nearest the last sighting is sent up. The trend for the police and others (local government, banks) has been to shut physical premises, as fewer people do business in person, and because premises are expensive to keep up. The call for having a physical premises, to take in and deploy things, continues to evolve.
