For over 150 years, Speaker's Corner has been one of London's most unique and eccentric attractions. On any given Sunday morning, anyone who has an opinion to air and anyone who will listen will gather at the point where Oxford Street and Hyde Park meet, in the shadows of Marble Arch and carry on an oral tradition that is becoming somewhat lost to a modern culture of email and online chat rooms.
A visit to Speaker's Corner will offer you a glimpse of London's real past, where people engage in earnest, open conversations that can quickly become loud and contentious debates. There's no parliamentary procedure here. It's freewheeling verbal contact and if you have a mind to, you're free to take part. Speakers require no qualification or invitation. It is as open a forum as you are likely to see anywhere in the world, a classless forum where one can really see grassroots democracy at work.
Topics for debate are in no way preordained, but they will tend towards the more provocative subjects of politics, religion, morality and current events.
Leslie James the Hyde Park pamphleteer wrote: Speakers' Corner has a more powerful influence than any "university" in the world, because here there are no entry requirements, no rules of intellectual formality and above all, no class restrictions.
