A stepladder, a patch of tarmac and a hundred and fifty years of Londoners arguing in the open air for nothing
Sunday at Speakers’ Corner, Where Anyone May Say Anything and Everyone Will Heckle
I have spent all week in rooms. A glass chamber in the docks. A panelled council hall. A school gym full of sticky dots. Each with its rules, its agenda and its bell. By Saturday night I had had enough of procedure. So this morning I went to the one place in London where politics has none. I stood on a patch of tarmac at the north-east corner of Hyde Park, in a raw wind, and listened to seven strangers shout.
It was magnificent. I have been hoarse since two o’clock and I only heckled twice.
The Place
Speakers’ Corner is not much to look at. It is the bit of the park nearest Marble Arch, where several paths meet: a wide area of paving, some railings, plane trees, a kiosk selling tea. On six days of the week it is empty. On Sunday, from about noon, people arrive carrying stepladders, milk crates and folding stools. They climb up. They begin to talk. A crowd gathers round each one, or does not.
There is no booking. No licence. No list. You bring something to stand on, since by custom a speaker should be off the ground, and you start. If you are interesting, people stay. If you are not, they drift to the next ladder. It is the purest market I know.
Why There
I looked up the history on the Tube, as I always do. It has two beginnings, one grim and one glorious.
The grim one. A few yards away stood the Tyburn gallows, where London hanged its criminals for six hundred years, until 1783. Hanging days were public holidays. And the condemned were allowed, by custom, to make a last speech to the crowd. They could say what they liked. Some confessed. Some protested their innocence. Some cursed the judge. It was the one moment of free expression a poor person could be sure of, and people remembered that the place had been one where you could speak.
The glorious one. In 1866 a campaign for giving working men the vote called a mass meeting in Hyde Park. The government banned it and locked the gates. A huge crowd arrived anyway, leaned on the railings until they gave way and held the meeting regardless. There were days of disturbance. The home secretary is said to have wept. In 1872 Parliament passed an act regulating the royal parks which, in effect, set aside this corner for public speaking. The Royal Parks still look after it.
Everyone has stood here. Karl Marx came to meetings. So did Lenin when he lived in London. William Morris spoke. The suffragettes held enormous rallies. George Orwell wrote that it was one of the minor wonders of the world. A Caribbean-born preacher and a Methodist minister each spoke here weekly for decades.
The Law
One myth to dispose of. People will tell you that at Speakers’ Corner you may say anything at all and cannot be arrested. That is not so. The ordinary law applies. You may not incite violence or racial hatred. The police are present, standing well back with their hands behind them, and step in from time to time.
What is true is that you need nobody’s permission and nobody may shut you up for being wrong, offensive to someone or merely tedious. A court confirmed some years ago that free speech covers the irritating, the contentious and the unwelcome, in a case that began on these paving stones.
Today’s Speakers
I did a full circuit with my notebook. In order.
A tall man on an aluminium stepladder, preaching the end of the world from a much-thumbed Bible, with a placard listing sins. He had a crowd of thirty, mostly tourists filming. He has, I was told, been coming for twenty-five years.
Six feet away, an atheist on a milk crate, whose entire act was to contradict the first man, sentence by sentence. They have also, I was told, been doing this for twenty-five years. They went for a cup of tea together at one.
A socialist with a red flag and a hand-painted banner, selling a newspaper. A man explaining why the socialist was wrong and selling a different newspaper. An elderly gentleman in a tweed cap with a theory about the monarchy and the pyramids that I could not follow and nobody else tried to. A woman speaking with great force and clarity about the state of care homes, drawing on forty years as a nurse; she had the biggest crowd of the day and deserved it.
And a young man of about nineteen who climbed onto a crate, opened his mouth, looked at the fifteen faces turned towards him and said: I have not really got a topic. The crowd cheered. Someone shouted, do the weather. So he did four minutes on why British people talk about the weather, and it was the best speech of the afternoon. I think I watched the birth of something.
The Hecklers
The speakers are only half of it. The art form here is the heckle. A proper crowd at Speakers’ Corner does not listen in silence. It answers back. Questions, objections, jokes, shouted from the floor, and the speaker must deal with each, on the spot, or lose the audience.
There are regular hecklers as well as regular speakers. They work the crowd like comedians. A good one can take a speaker apart with a single well-timed question. A great speaker welcomes it, because a heckler is a free straight man. I watched the nurse handle a man who called out that it was all down to laziness. She asked him, pleasantly, how many bedpans he had emptied this week, and waited, and the crowd waited with her. He left.
My own two contributions were to the tweed cap, and I am not proud of either.
There is old London in the heckling, too. I heard a man tell a speaker he was talking a load of pony, and another that he was having a bubble. The paper’s guide to Cockney rhyming slang explains both; the second is bubble bath, a laugh. I had to look up the first and wish I had not.
What It Is For
You could say it does not matter. Nothing said there today will change a law or a vote. The big arguments have moved to screens, where a far larger crowd can be had without getting cold.
But I noticed something, after my week of meetings. On a screen you can say what you like to people you cannot see, and they can say what they like back, and nobody is changed. At the corner, you have to stand in front of them. They can see your face. If you say something cruel, you watch it land. If you say something stupid, a man in a bobble hat tells you so, to your face, and then, quite often, offers you a mint.
I saw people who disagreed about God, the economy and the pyramids standing shoulder to shoulder in the cold for two hours, arguing at the tops of their voices, and not one of them was afraid. I thought it the healthiest political event I had attended all year.
The Piece
I write for The London Prat, and I have filed this. All online debate in the United Kingdom, the item reports, is to be relocated to a paved area in Hyde Park, where users will be required to stand on a crate and say it to the person’s face. Early trials saw a ninety per cent fall in contributions and a sharp rise in the sharing of mints. A man with views on the pyramids said he welcomed the change.
The essay I keep by me, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, says our trade is a branch of the same right those railings came down for: to say the unwelcome thing in public and take what comes back. I had not thought of the paper as a kind of stepladder. I do now. It goes on the British satirical news page tomorrow.
The nineteen-year-old is coming back next Sunday. He says he will have a topic. I told him not to. My other reports are over here.