'We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology

It can pick out shoplifters, international criminals and lost children in seconds. But as the cameras proliferate, who's watching the watchers?

Gordon's wine bar is reached through a discreet side-door, a few paces from the slipstream of London theatregoers and suited professionals powering towards their evening train. A steep staircase plunges visitors into a dimly lit cavern, lined with dusty champagne bottles and faded newspaper clippings, which appears to have had only minor refurbishment since it opened in 1890. "If Miss Havisham was in the licensing trade," an Evening Standard review once suggested, "this could have been the result."

The bar's Dickensian gloom is a selling point for people embarking on affairs, and actors or politicians wanting a quiet drink - but also for pickpockets. When Simon Gordon took over the family business in the early 2000s, he would spend hours scrutinising the faces of the people who haunted his CCTV footage. "There was one guy who I almost felt I knew," he says. "He used to come down here the whole time and steal." The man vanished for a six-month stretch, but then reappeared, chubbier, apparently after a stint in jail. When two of Gordon's friends visited the bar for lunch and both had their wallets pinched in his presence, he decided to take matters into his own hands. "The police did nothing about it," he says. "It really annoyed me."