Do You Need a Photography Permit in London?

Start with what is actually settled. The Home Office's stop and search code of practice, published 18 July 2022, states plainly that members of the public and the media do not need a permit to film or photograph incidents, and that police officers have no power to delete or destroy photographs or footage taken in public places. That is a national policing document, not a local council rule, and it sets the floor everywhere in London: a photographer and a client walking a public pavement, taking handheld portrait photos, are not doing anything that requires anyone's permission.

Film London, the capital's own film office, describes the underlying right in the same terms for filming: on the public highway, working handheld and without obstructing anyone, needs no licence at all. The one statutory limit that does exist is the Highways Act 1980, section 137, which makes it an offence to wilfully obstruct free passage along a highway, not a photography-specific rule, but the reason a photographer plants a tripod for thirty seconds and moves rather than blocking a pavement for an hour.

None of that changes once you step off a public pavement onto land someone else owns or manages. That is where every rule below actually starts.

The Royal Parks (Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Regent's Park, St James's Park, Greenwich Park, Richmond Park, Bushy Park) are the clearest exception to the pavement rule, because they say so themselves: "any filming, photography or audio recording that takes place in parks requires permission" and, in most cases, a fee. Their permit-free carve-out is narrow and specific: personal use is defined as images "captured on small handheld devices such as mobile phones", which by the Royal Parks' own wording excludes a dedicated camera used for a paid portrait session.

For the kind of session this site tracks, engagement photos, family portraits, couple shoots, the relevant product is the Royal Parks' Wedding & Lifestyle permit. It explicitly covers "engagement, wedding and civil partnership photography, individual and family portraits" and costs £100 + VAT (£120 total) for one photographer, strictly one hour, a maximum of ten people, with £5 million public liability insurance required and a minimum of ten working days' notice before the shoot. Regent's Park runs its own separate online application rather than the shared portal the other parks use.

For anything beyond a portrait session, the Royal Parks' commercial rate card, updated January 2026, prices "other filming, photography and sound recording" (the category that explicitly includes portfolio shoots) at £340 + VAT for one to five people, up to four hours, in Zone A parks (St James's, Green Park, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, Regent's Park, Primrose Hill), or £250 + VAT for the same terms in Zone B parks (Greenwich, Richmond, Bushy). One thing worth flagging plainly: the Royal Parks publish no tripod rule at all across any of this documentation. Anyone repeating a Royal Parks tripod ban online is not quoting the parks' own published rules.

Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square sit under Greater London Authority byelaws rather than a borough's rules. Byelaw 5(1)(p) bans photography "for the purpose of or in connection with a business, trade, profession or employment" without written permission from the Mayor of London. Commercial applications cost £1,000 + VAT per hour for exclusive use of the square, require £5 million public liability insurance, and need 14 working days' notice.

The GLA's own Pre-Authorisation Scheme document (Issue 2.1, March 2012), the same document that sets out the byelaw, also states that the byelaws "place no restrictions on private or amateur photography" and instructs wardens to ask about your purpose and let you continue if you are not shooting commercially. Those two statements sit in the same document and are not fully reconciled; the contradictions section below sets out exactly where that leaves a paid marketplace photoshoot.

One more distinction worth knowing: the GLA controls the square itself, but Westminster City Council, not the GLA, controls the North Terrace outside the National Gallery, so a shoot that moves from the square onto that terrace has crossed into a different rulebook entirely.

Westminster City Council's filming and photography guidance, last updated 11 May 2026, is the rule most relevant to this site's sessions, because most of them shoot Westminster pavements. No application is needed if all of the following hold: the on-street team is five people or fewer, the equipment is handheld only (the council states explicitly "no tripods, drones, jibs, lights/monitors on stands"), at least two metres of clear pavement is left for pedestrians, the shoot stays on the pavement rather than the road, and the location is not a Red Route (Park Lane, Victoria Embankment, Marylebone Road among others) or Royal Parks land (The Mall, Birdcage Walk, Constitution Hill).

Westminster states plainly that other London boroughs allow tripods on their pavements and Westminster does not, an explicit, self-aware exception rather than an oversight. If a shoot does need a tripod, Westminster's basic filming application processes in three working days.

This is the rule almost every session on the homepage's catalogue is built around without saying so: the Big Ben hour, the landmarks walk and the video-clip session are all handheld, small-group bookings on Westminster pavements, inside the no-application threshold by construction, not by luck.

The City of London Corporation's rules, updated 6 July 2026, work differently from Westminster's headcount threshold. A Notice of No Objection covers small, portable street shoots on ordinary City streets. But any filming or photography on City Corporation property needs an application "regardless of crew size", and that property list includes Tower Bridge, Millennium Bridge, London Bridge, Southwark Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge, the City's gardens, and Leadenhall and Smithfield Markets. A single photographer and one client on Tower Bridge is, on paper, in the same application category as a full film crew.

The City's published street fees (16 June 2026, plus VAT) are tiered: £40 for charity or student shoots, £95 for a small crew shooting handheld with up to five people, and £210 for a crew using a camera and tripod with up to ten people. Its gardens carry a separate note worth reading exactly as published: "visitors to our open spaces are welcome to take photos… there is no need [to] ask permission" for casual visitor photos, but an organised photoshoot needs a licence, and the City's own wedding and lifestyle category, "including engagement, wedding, civil partnerships, other celebrations and portraits and stills", costs £294 for up to two hours, between 08:00 and 18:00.

Millennium Bridge has its own fee structure layered on top: the first 30 minutes are covered by the base application fee, a shoot up to two hours costs £300, and up to four hours costs £500.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's film fees document (2024–25) requires a Notice of No Objection above five people and/or when non-handheld equipment is used. A small crew shoot costs £94; Portobello Road carries an extra fee priced on application; and a stills shoot of no more than two people qualifies for a 50 percent concession with a £37.50 minimum. Any shoot in one of the borough's parks needs an application "regardless of cast and crew size, including all wedding/engagement shoots", RBKC draws no small-crew exemption for parks the way it does for streets.

RBKC's own documentation is not internally consistent on tripods: the fees PDF and the borough's FilmFixer application page state the rule differently from each other, and this page is not going to guess which one governs in practice; treat a tripod on an RBKC street as something to clear with the council directly rather than assume either page settles it.

One more thing worth being precise about: RBKC publishes no rule at all, permit or otherwise, about photographing the exteriors of Notting Hill's pastel houses from the public pavement. What stops a photographer from posing clients on someone's front steps is etiquette, not law: those houses are private homes, and the Notting Hill session on this site shoots from the pavement for exactly that reason, not because a council rule requires it.

Beyond the borough and park rules above, several named locations run their own equipment and permission rules that sit on top of everything else.

Tower Bridge bans tripods inside the attraction itself, states that photographing the bridge from public space needs no permission from the bridge's owner, and bans drones within 50 metres. Sky Garden permits personal photography inside but bans tripods, flash and other specialist equipment, and separately bans selfie sticks, tripods and umbrellas on its open-air terrace. Borough Market allows personal photography but bans long lenses and tripods outright, and its rules count multiple lenses or a camera bag as "professional-grade equipment" that needs written permission in advance; commercial requests need 14 days' notice.

Covent Garden, run by Shaftesbury Capital, requires emailed permission and £10 million public liability insurance for any shoot, and its own published wording consistently uses the word "film", never "photography", which leaves a genuine gap in what the document actually covers for a stills-only session; treat it as covered by the same permission requirement rather than assuming the silence on stills means no permission is needed.

On the Underground, TfL allows private photography through a station at the station's own discretion, "as long as additional camera equipment (including flash and tripods) is not used", and tripods are never allowed on platforms or near escalators regardless of discretion. Commercial filming on the network starts from £1,095 an hour, needs 15 working days' notice and £10 million insurance, and TfL publishes no student or charity discount rate.

Location by Location: Who Owns It, What a Paid Portrait Session Needs, the Fee

The UK Civil Aviation Authority's Drone Code (March 2026) requires a Flyer ID from 100 grams of drone weight, not the 250 grams figure that circulates in a lot of general guidance, meaning almost any drone capable of taking usable photographs needs one. An Operator ID costs £12.34 a year, and Remote ID broadcast became mandatory from 1 January 2026 for drones in the UK1 to UK3 operational classes.

None of that matters much in central London because the airspace itself is closed. Three restricted areas (EGR157 over Hyde Park, EGR158 over the City of London, and EGR159 over the Isle of Dogs) run from the surface up to 1,400 feet, well above the standard 120-metre legal ceiling for drone flight. In practice, that makes central London off-limits to drone photography regardless of registration status, and the rule against flying over crowds applies everywhere else in the city no matter how light the drone is.

Drone Rules at a Glance

Two of the rules above do not fully agree with themselves, and the honest answer is to name both readings rather than pick one and present it as settled.

The first is Trafalgar and Parliament Square's own governing document. GLA byelaw 5(1)(p) bans photography "for the purpose of or in connection with a business, trade, profession or employment" without written permission. The same Pre-Authorisation Scheme document that quotes that byelaw also states the byelaws "place no restrictions on private or amateur photography" and tells wardens to ask about purpose and let non-commercial photographers continue. A paid marketplace portrait session sits in an ambiguous middle: the client's photos are not being sold or published for the photographer's business in the way the byelaw's language seems aimed at, but the photographer is plainly working professionally. The document itself, dated March 2012, does not resolve which limb governs a paid personal portrait session. In practice, wardens make the call on the day based on what they observe, and a small handheld session doing what looks like personal photography is treated the way the "no restrictions on private or amateur photography" line describes.

The second is RBKC's tripod rule. The borough's fees PDF and its FilmFixer online application page state the tripod requirement differently from each other, and nothing in either published source explains which one is the current, authoritative version. This page is not going to guess. If a tripod matters to your shoot in Kensington and Chelsea, the only reliable answer is asking the council directly rather than trusting either page in isolation.