Free speech isn’t just about speaking. It’s also about listening.
– Tim Cook
You’re standing at the site of the world’s oldest, public, internationally recognized, open-air, free speech platform.
Once the site of gallows, for nearly six centuries more than 50,000 were given the right to utter a final, unedited speech here before they were hanged. The gruesome executions, often considered public entertainment, were big social events, but when mass protests erupted across the city, people came to this site to fight for the right to assemble resulting in the Park Regulations Act which formally reserved the area for freedom of expression.
During the park’s more than one hundred and fifty years as a bastion of free speech, orators like Karl Marx, Vladamir Lenin and George Orwell have argued for the liberation of the proletariat and granting women the right to vote. The space, deemed by Orwell as a place with a “large variety of plain lunatics,” epitomizes the core institution.
Today the park fills one morning each week with weird and wonderful people orating on diverse, often fringe topics to create a lively, chaotic atmosphere. After taking pictures of the site for 35 years, photographer Philip Wolmuth described the place in his 2015 book. “It’s where political radicals preach revolution and religious fundamentalists tell of the end times standing on soapboxes and making speeches to anyone who will listen.”
Sadly, the original wooden crate ‘soapboxes’ once found around every corner were banned in 2024 along with other platforms, stools and ladders. Yet anyone can still turn up unannounced and find space to speak. With no prohibited topics, people come out not only to hear arguments that differ from their own but to ask questions, enjoy a little good-humored heckling and foster amicable debate.
Reid and Robie ask, “Where are you now?”
Send us the name of the place and city, and we’ll post the winner with the next Where are you now? quiz.
The answer to the last Where are you now? quiz was Ravenna, Italy first answered correctly by Marbeth Richmond barely edging out Elegant Sweetly.
Congratulations to both!