


Almost overnight, the pickpockets vanished, possibly put off by a warning at the entrance that the cameras are in use.
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Gordon installed a £3,000 camera system at the entrance to the bar and, using off-the-shelf software to carry out facial recognition analysis, began collating a private watchlist of people he had observed stealing, being aggressive or causing damage. Nick Fisher, a former retail executive, was appointed Facewatch CEO Gordon is its chairman. Two years ago, when facial recognition technology was becoming widely available, the business pivoted from simply reporting into active crime deterrence. He makes an unlikely tech entrepreneur, but his frustration spurred him to launch Facewatch, a fast-track crime-reporting platform that allows clients (shops, hotels, casinos) to upload an incident report and CCTV clips to the police. Gordon is in his early 60s, with sandy hair and a glowing tan that hints at regular visits to Italian vineyards. “The police did nothing about it,” he says. 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. “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.

“There was one guy who I almost felt I knew,” he says. 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. 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. “If Miss Havisham was in the licensing trade,” an Evening Standard review once suggested, “this could have been the result.” 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. 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.
