December 2024 - Hyde Park, London. 142 hectares or 350 acres, or a dozen Wembley Stadiums in size, if that’s more relatable. One of the eight Royal Parks and home to Kensington Palace, memorials to Prince Albert and Princess Diana and the Serpentine Lake. It’s surrounded by Buckingham Palace, the Royal Albert Hall and Marble Arch, and in 1872, an Act of Parliament (The Royal Parks and Gardens Regulation Act) designated a small part of it to be set aside to allow people to vent their spleen, preach to the ‘uneducated’, and profess to the world what they believed in, and what you should too !
Speakers' Corner is located on the north-east edge of Hyde Park, near to Marble Arch and Oxford Street and on a Sunday, people of all shapes, sizes, colours and creeds gather to do just that. There are no specific rules, anyone can turn up to speak, you don’t have to book a space or pay a fee, and you can ‘speak’ about anything you want - as long as the police consider it to be within the law. Politics and religion tend to be the main talking points, but every now and then you’ll get someone with a topic that really is ‘off the wall’.
Most of the people that gather there today to voice their opinions, might not realise it, but this location is steeped in history and for this very purpose. Over eight hundred years ago, and just over the way at the junction of Bayswater Road and Edgeware Road stood the Tyburn Gallows, which delivered the final act for over 50,000 people in the (almost) six hundred years that it existed. In the mid fifteen hundreds, so many people were being executed that the gallows had to be redesigned into a triangular shape, with three separate beams so that multiple executions could take place, on each beam, at the same time.
In those days this was also seen as a form of entertainment as well as a chance to see justice being done and at one point, so many came that seating areas needed to be built, and tickets sold. Hundreds and sometimes thousands would attend, depending on who was about to lose their life, all alerted in the morning by the sound of a specific bell being tolled at the church of St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate, a bell that was only ever tolled on a day when executions would be taking place. The church still stands to this day, near to the Old Bailey, and at the time, Newgate Prison, where the criminals were held. The prison was demolished in 1904, but the Execution Bell, as it became known, can still be seen on display in the church itself. Those condemned were allowed to make a final speech, ‘have the last word’ you might say, but they were often barracked and ridiculed by the crowd as they spoke their final words and eventually these events became too rowdy and boisterous that they had to be moved inside the prison - much to the disdain of the paying public who had grown fond of a ‘good execution’ !
Oliver Cromwell breathed his last here - or rather he didn’t, as he was already dead and was put on display by order of the then Cavalier Parliament as an act of revenge for his part in the execution of King Charles I. It was also the site where the English Martyrs, forty upstanding Catholic men and women who declined the instruction of Henry VIII to support his Pilgrimage of Grace and subsequently the Act of Supremacy, or for not swearing their allegiance to Queen Elizabeth I and her Act of Supremacy or plotting against King Charles II, amongst other charges, but mainly high treason, over a period of 144 years.
The English Martyrs were recognised by the Catholic Church for their sacrifice and beatified in 1886 by Pope Leo XIII and in 1929 by Pope Pius XI, finally achieving sainthood in 1970 when they were canonised by Pope Paul VI. Their Feast Day takes place on 4th of May in England and the 25th of October in Wales, although many of them have their own particular Feast Day during the year. If you walk a few hundred yards from the site of the gallows to the Tyburn Convent in Hyde Park Place, you’ll find a plaque dedicated to the memory of the Catholic martyrs that were executed at Tyburn between 1535 and 1681.
Hyde Park wasn’t the only place where free speech could be voiced however, as there were many across the country. In London alone there were more than a dozen at one time, in places such as Clapham, Finsbury Park and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but today it’s this one that stands as the last bastion and will remain so as long as the Act of Parliament remains in place. In more recent times, legendary names such as Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx and George Orwell have taken advantage of this particular Speakers Corner to profess their beliefs, as did the suffragettes during their campaign for Votes for Women.
Today, it’s often the site where many of the protests that take place in London will start, with gatherings on many Saturdays during Spring and Summer being roused and rehearsed, before they begin their march through the city, usually to Piccadilly Circus or more likely to Parliament Square Garden, opposite the Houses of Parliament, and under the watchful eye of Sir Winston Churchill. On Sundays, it can get a little scary at times, but if there’s a really heated difference of opinion, the Police don’t tend to mess about, and any issues are dealt with before you know it. For entertainment value, it’s a good way to spend an hour or so, out of idle curiosity if nothing else, and you never know, you just might learn something - but then again, you just might not.
You can find more images from my visit to Speakers' Corner, by clicking here...