Confronted with a shrinking financial resource, the public authorities in the UK have limitations on investing in public space. Therefore, the traditional state-owned public space may not be the only form of public space today. As the transfer mechanism of ownership or management of public space becomes increasingly common, more concerns about publicness have been raised. There are lots of polemic critiques, concerning the privatization of public space would diminish the publicness of contemporary public space. However, this light has become more controversial recently, arguing an opposite sequence of privatization, especially in the British case. This research focuses on the debate on the privatization of public space and investigates the impact on publicness of public space by positive impacts on the ‘publicness’ with regard to management, access and use/users.