London began deploying closed-circuit television cameras for public surveillance and crime detection in Trafalgar Square and later across the city in the late 1960s, becoming the pioneer of what would become the world's most extensive urban surveillance network. CCTV footage became an increasingly significant form of criminal evidence from the 1970s onwards, transforming both investigative capacity and public expectation of visual evidence. By the 2010s, Greater London had over half a million CCTV cameras, more per capita than almost anywhere else on earth.

London's CCTV expansion made Britain the defining literary landscape for writing about the surveillance society. George Orwell's 1984, written from London in 1948, had prophesied the panopticon city; by the 1990s that city had become real. British poets including Carol Ann Duffy and novelists including Will Self wrote about surveillance as a defining condition of British urban life. The CCTV camera became a symbol in contemporary British poetry of the watched self, the evidence of ordinary life permanently recorded.