Speaker's Corner: Born from the Last Words of the Condemned

You are standing on ground soaked in six centuries of defiance. This peaceful corner of Hyde Park... was once the most feared address in London. Welcome to Speakers' Corner.

London · from the walk “The People's Park: Secrets & Untold Stories of Hyde Park”

Open the walk

Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, London W1H 7EJ

You are standing on ground soaked in six centuries of defiance. This peaceful corner of Hyde Park... was once the most feared address in London. Welcome to Speakers' Corner.

The Tyburn Gallows were installed here in eleven ninety-six, and by the time they were dismantled in seventeen eighty-three, more than fifty thousand people had been executed on this spot. Let that number sink in. Fifty... Thousand.

In fifteen seventy-one, a permanent triangular gallows was erected... a mammoth wooden structure reaching six metres high. It could hang twenty-four people at once. Londoners called it the Tyburn Tree.

Now here's what most people don't know. Everyone condemned to die at Tyburn could make a final speech. Some confessed, others protested their innocence or criticised the authorities. Catholics, for example, took advantage of the blurred division between treason and religion in their dying speech, openly opposing the Church of England. These martyrs opened up a public theological debate, and some listeners actually became convinced and converted to the Catholic cause. The scaffold... became a stage.

The spectacles drew Enormous crowds. When the notorious escape artist Jack Sheppard was hanged here in seventeen twenty-four, the occasion was attended by crowds of as many as two hundred thousand people... one Third of London's entire population. On the way to the gallows, prisoners stopped at inns along the route and were offered drinks. It was not uncommon for them to arrive at the scaffold drunk and disorderly.

But the gallows eventually came down... and the tradition of speaking out stayed. In eighteen fifty-five, public riots broke out here in protest over the Sunday Trading Bill, and Karl Marx himself declared this the beginning of the English revolution. He was wrong about that. But not about the power of this place.

In eighteen sixty-six, when the Reform League marched here demanding voting rights and found the park Locked, demonstrators tore up hundreds of yards of railings to gain access, and three days of rioting followed. The Home Secretary, Spencer Walpole, resigned the next day. Six years later, in the eighteen seventy-two Parks Regulation Act, the right to meet and speak freely in Hyde Park was formally established.

And what a parade of voices followed! This corner was frequented by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell, Marcus Garvey, and Kwame Nkrumah. But here's my favourite detail. When Lenin and his wife Krupskaya arrived in London, they found they could not understand a single word, and nobody understood them. They started going to all kinds of meetings, stood in the front row, and carefully studied the orator's mouth. They went fairly often to Hyde Park. They were particularly keen on one speaker... because he spoke with an Irish accent, which was easier for them to understand. The explanation is that when Lenin arrived in London around nineteen oh two, the English teacher he could afford was an Irishman. So picture it... the future leader of the Russian Revolution, standing Right here, learning English with a Dublin accent!

George Orwell described this place as "one of the minor wonders of the world." Of the estimated one hundred speaking places found weekly across London between eighteen fifty-five and nineteen thirty-nine, Speakers' Corner is the Last to survive.

Look around you. No stage, no microphone, no permission needed. Just an open patch of grass where, for over eight hundred years... people have insisted on being heard.

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