Very few things make me angry; as a busker, a passive mentality is essential. Some of the things that have been said to me whilst performing have been far from complementary, but luckily this is rare. Recently though, I have been sticking it to the man and busking in an area in my home town of Harlow, which is quasi-public space.

Quasi-public space? What is that I hear you ask. From this Guardian article:

“Quasi-public space” is land that is open to all comers but which is under private ownership – classically, the public areas of shopping centres. As the law stands, owners of quasi-public space have absolute discretion over who can enter their property and what they can do there. Anyone remaining on their property without consent is liable for trespass.

What this means in practice that a busker can be harassed within 20 minutes of setting up, threatened with permanent exclusion from the entirety of the area…and the police basically treating you as a criminal.

Legally speaking, if you are not in this area as a consumer and/or have no commercial intensions, the property owner (and therefore their security staff) have the right revoke you invitation to be there. I can be banned from walking in MY town, for the act of busking.

This is where I rant!

Why do I have to be consumer constantly when walking in my town? Since when has walking in my town been by invitation? And since when was busking an illegal activity?

Why has this liberty been taken away from us?! Because the companies behind the building of these new areas in our towns and cities want to be able to control what goes on at the cost of our own civil liberties. Our rights have been taken away from us without our consent.

It means security staff on the authority of the landowners have the right to “act worse than ISIS”, as one bystander said while they were reprimanding me.

I understand that I am only looking at this form the perspective of busking, but the creation of a quasi-public space has an effect on peaceful protest and demonstration.

It will be the death of our towns let alone the death of busking!

Stefan Mullard

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*Editor’s Note: If you want to read a brilliantly-written and very accessible criticism of the topic of how BIDs are limiting our rights in public spaces, click here.

The Busking Project feels that if businesses want to control public spaces, they should be allowed to under certain conditions. BIDs should be allowed to help the Local Authority clean the pavements in the area, and to do various infrastructure projects. But they should not be allowed to take away basic freedoms, like busking, or protest, or anything else that is our legal (or constitutional) right.

Whether ANY public spaces should be “sold off” to BIDs is another issue. But, if we could convince BIDs that buskers were good for the local economy, they could potentially be bigger advocates than Local Authorities, as complaints about busking would come up against the same indifference as complaints about advertising and signage – good for business is good for towns, so like it or leave it.

As we are increasingly finding, government-controlled public spaces are not necessarily freer than quasi public ones.

Feature Photo taken from this article featuring a BLM protest – which faces a similar problem.

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