Hatun Tash Confronts Ali Dawah #speakerscorner

Speakers here may talk on any subject, as long as the police consider their speeches lawful, although this right is not restricted to Speakers' Corner only. Contrary to popular belief, there is no immunity from the law, nor are any subjects proscribed, but in practice the police intervene only when they receive a complaint.[1] On some occasions in the past, they have intervened on grounds of profanity.[2]

Though Hyde Park Speakers' Corner is considered the paved area closest to Marble Arch,[3] legally the public speaking area extends beyond the Reform Tree and covers a large area from Marble Arch to Victoria Gate, then along the Serpentine to Hyde Park Corner and the Broad Walk running from Hyde Park Corner to Marble Arch.[4]

Public riots broke out in the park in 1855, in protest over the Sunday Trading Bill, which forbade buying and selling on a Sunday, the only day working people had off. The riots were rather optimistically described by Karl Marx as "the beginning of the English revolution".[5]

The Chartist movement used Hyde Park as a point of assembly for popular protests, but no permanent speaking location was established. The Reform League organised a massive demonstration in 1866 and then again in 1867, which compelled the government to extend the franchise to include most working-class men.[citation needed]

Speakers' Corner is often held up to demonstrate freedom of speech, as anyone can turn up unannounced and talk on almost any subject, although always at the risk of being heckled by regulars. The corner was frequented by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin,[6] George Orwell, C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Ben Tillett, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, and William Morris.[7]

In June 1972 three men, Joseph Callinan, Louis Marcantonio, and Thomas Quinn, all Irish republican activists, were arrested and charged under the Treason Felony Act 1848 which saw them face the prospect of life imprisonment. They also faced numerous other charges including conspiring to fight against Her Majesty's forces and incitement.[8] The three had given inflammatory speeches at Speakers' Corner in response to the shooting dead of 13 civil rights demonstrators in Derry by the British Military in an event known as Bloody Sunday. Most of the charges were eventually dropped and the three were convicted of seditious utterances and given sentences of between nine and eighteen months in prison.[9]

Lord Justice Sedley, in Redmond-Bate v Director of Public Prosecutions (1999), described Speakers' Corner as demonstrating "the tolerance which is both extended by the law to opinion of every kind and expected by the law in the conduct of those who disagree, even strongly, with what they hear." The ruling famously established in English case law that freedom of speech could not be limited to the inoffensive but extended also to "the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome, and the provocative, as long as such speech did not tend to provoke violence", and that the right to free speech accorded by Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights also accorded the right to be offensive. Prior to the ruling, prohibited speech at Speakers' Corner included obscenity, blasphemy, insulting the Queen, or inciting a breach of the peace.[10][11]

In the late 19th century, for instance, a combination of park by-laws, use of the Highways Acts and use of venue licensing powers of the London County Council made it one of the few places where socialist speakers could meet and debate.