The Enigma of Free Speech: Speakers’ Corner, The Geography of Governance and a Crisis of Rationality

Abstract

Officially sanctioned in 1872 by the Royal Parks and Gardens Regulation Act, Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London is often seen as a potent symbol for free speech in Britain. Yet this image is highly problematic. Nowhere in the original 1872 Act does the term ‘free speech’ appear. In this article it is argued that this enigma is in fact perfectly understandable for two reasons. First, the sign ‘speech’ had carved out a distinct geographical and moral space in Hyde Park over a century before 1872. Constituted through the ‘last dying speeches’ of the criminal class of 18th-century London, this subaltern rationality rendered visible the class character of law by disrupting the distancing of legal discourse from governance. Secondly, by undertaking a genealogical investigation of the sign ‘speech’ at Hyde Park, the traces left by scaffold culture were re-combined to slowly translate ‘last dying speeches’ into a more overtly political proletarian public sphere. The political mediation of the sign ‘speech’ meant that the state had to respond to this sign by overcoming the failures of Tyburn and impose a successful mode of governance at Hyde Park. The 1872 Royal Parks and Gardens Regulation Act was an attempt by the state to accomplish this task.