Henley-on-Thames has new public space CCTV .
The local authority, South Oxfordshire District Council, reports that it was careful to stress that the equipment must in no way detract from the town’s beauty.
Having won the contract to develop, supply and install the system, Siemens Building Technologies, Security Systems, addressed this requirement by using cameras in the town centre which were selected to blend in with street furniture, according to the company.
The installation includes 20 pan tilt and zoom (PTZ) cameras which cover the town centre, and the local Riverside area, Mill Meadows. All the new cameras are installed on specially designed columns to blend with Henley’s street lights.
The cameras are linked by an optical-fibre network; installation required civil works throughout the town. Siemens carried this out with a minimum of disruption to pedestrians and road traffic, the firm reports, and reinstated the previous environment after the work.
Control centre
Pictures produced by the system are transmitted in real-time, at 25 frames per second, to the main control centre, 21 miles away in Abingdon. There, operators have control over the cameras for Henley, plus other towns in the South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse districts. Siemens has equipped the centre with a digital hard-disk recording system that stores images at RAID 5 standard, at 12.5 frames per second.
The images from Henley’s CCTV installation are also made available to the local police control room via a private fibre cable connection. This arrangement provides cost savings for South Oxfordshire, it is claimed, compared with the alternative of using a leased line.
What they say
"Not only is the installation as unobtrusive as we hoped it would be, it’s also effective in detecting and deterring town-centre crime," said Pat Dawe, South Oxfordshire District Council Cabinet member for community safety. "The CCTV operators report incidents direct to the police control room, give CCTV support to police officers attending incidents and produce evidence packs for further investigations."
