Speakers Corner Trust

Nottingham

Following eight months of consultation and development and with the wholehearted and active support of Nottingham City Council and other key partners, SCT’s first UK project was launched in Nottingham on 22 February 2008.

Nottingham was chosen for the pilot partly because of its status as a major city with a celebrated freethinking tradition but not least because of the rich diversity of its communities which, from the days of the legendary Robin Hood, have played an important part in the campaigns for individual freedom and social justice.

Public Consultation

SCT consulted extensively throughout the summer and autumn of 2007 with key representatives of Nottingham’s public, private and voluntary sectors. On 2 October, the public had their first chance to have a say about SCT’s plans at a ‘Coffee House Challenge’ meeting organised by the Royal Society of Arts at Starbucks in Clumber Street.

The RSA’s Coffee House Challenge, co-sponsored by Starbucks and T-Mobile, is designed to bring local people together over coffee to talk about the community issues they care about. The Clumber Street event was a great success with an impressive attendance of Nottingham people of all ages and backgrounds, a great deal of enthusiasm for the Speakers’ Corner project and several original ideas on how to take it forward.

There was broad consensus about the need to provide opportunities for people to exchange ideas and opinions about anything from global warming to the most local of issues - and to create new platforms, particularly for those who have had little opportunity in the past to speak or be heard.

There was agreement too about the project’s potential to provide both an important community focus and a new image for Nottingham.

When asked what it would take to get people involved in the project itself, a fairly typical response was “just ask!”

Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner

Just a few months later, in January 2008, representatives of a wide range of public, private and voluntary organisations and the community came together to form the twenty-strong Nottingham Speakers’ Corner Committee which will ‘own’ and steer the initiative over the long term.

And just weeks later, the Committee made a historic decision. Following a comprehensive review of options, it adopted the Council’s recommendation, supported by the police and SCT, of the proposed location for what will be the first Speakers’ Corner in the UK since an Act of Parliament paved the way for the original in London’s Hyde Park almost 150 years ago.

The site is at the junction of King Street and Queen Street at the edge of Nottingham’s historic Market Square. The space is to be paved and landscaped and will also provide the home for a new statue of Brian Clough, the legendary, straight-talking former manager of Nottingham Forest FC. Subject to consultation with the occupiers of surrounding shops and offices, the space will be designed over the spring and early summer and it is hoped that Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner will be officially inaugurated in the autumn. In the meantime, a temporary Speakers’ Corner has been established opposite Debenhams on Market Square.

Announcing the Committee’s decision, its chair Tim Desmond, who is also chief executive of the Galleries of Justice, emphasised one crucial difference between Nottingham’s proposed Speakers’ Corner and the original in Hyde Park when he explained that “we considered the options very carefully and are confident that King Street is the right site for Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner. There are larger and perhaps more flexible spaces elsewhere but they’re outside the city centre and that reduces their value. The whole point of our Speakers’ Corner is that it should be accessible to all and that if something interesting or important is happening there it can attract and engage people as they go about their daily business. That’s what makes it different from Hyde Park and, we believe, it’s what will make our Speakers’ Corner such an important feature of Nottingham life.”

The new public space will in effect extend Market Square which throughout Nottingham’s history has played an important role as a centre of radicalism and reform.

From the eighteenth century onwards it featured as a rallying point for the campaign for working people’s rights and political enfranchisement and there was an informal Speakers’ Corner there as recently as the 1960s.

The view of the proposed Speakers’ Corner site from Market Square

The view of the Council House from the proposed Speakers’ Corner site

Support for Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner has been almost universally enthusiastic. The editorial of the Nottingham Evening Post declared on the day the Speakers’ Corner site was announced (11 February 2008), “how wonderful to see Nottingham reviving the tradition of a speaker’s corner in the city centre. And how appropriate that it will be sited at the bottom of King Street and Queen Street alongside the promised statue of Brian Clough. Now he could talk …Older readers may remember speakers doing their soapbox routines in Old Market Square in the 20th Century. The paving of the new square will be extended into the new speaker’s corner and we look forward to hearing orators sound off on their pet subjects. With a little regulation and promotion the spot could become a real destination for city centre visitors.”

Nottingham people - and not least Robin Hood - have played a leading part in shaping the British tradition of radical thinking, among them Lord Byron and DH Lawrence.

Both, in their different ways, campaigned for the cause of freedom. Byron was not only an advocate of social reform at home but also played his part in the Italian struggle against Imperial Austria. He died of fever at Messolonghi in 1824 while fighting with the Greeks in their War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire.

In one of his greatest poems, Childe Harold (canto IV, st. 98), he wrote of the inevitable triumph of freedom’s cause:

“Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, / Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.”

DH Lawrence came from an altogether less privileged background and rebelled against what he saw as the suppression of the free spirit by grind of industrialisation and the dead hand of the prevailing social order.

Lawrence was himself the victim of persecution for his forthright views and often explicit novels which, though now regarded as literary masterpieces, were condemned and, in the case of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, censored as recently as the 1960s. Indeed, Lawrence lived much of the last ten years before his death in 1930 in voluntary exile abroad.

He was keenly aware of the price to be paid in struggle for freedom. He warned in his poem Liberty’s Old, Old Story, “Men fight for liberty, and win it with hard knocks. / Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. / And their grandchildren are once more slaves.”

Nottingham can also boast that it elected, in 1847, the first and only Chartist Member of Parliament, the radical agitator Feargus O’Connor. He presided over the last great Chartist demonstration in London the following year but died in an asylum in 1855.

Today Nottingham is home to the National Centre for Citizenship & the Law, part of the Galleries of Justice exhibition based in the city’s old courthouse in the historic Lace Market.

Coaching Nottingham’s Orators

In the run up to the launch, Nottingham Playhouse organised a series of workshops, both in the theatre’s rehearsal room and in the community, to help members of the public take full advantage of the new opportunities for self expression and debate which the Speakers’ Corner project will bring to Nottingham.

The workshops schooled Nottingham’s would-be orators on how to overcome stage fright and how to gather their thoughts and speak confidently in public.

Robin Kingsland, the actor and writer who led the workshops, said, “it may sound daunting to some, but once you’ve learned a few basic skills, you never look back – and being able to express yourself with confidence is one of the most liberating and exhilarating experiences I know”.

Eddie Izzard Backs Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner

Just a week before its launch, Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner received a tremendous boost when it won the personal endorsement of Eddie Izzard, the stand-up genius turned Hollywood star, in a major TV interview.

Eddie Izzard

Speaking about the Speakers’ Corner initiative on BBC1’s flagship Politics Show (Sunday 17 February), Eddie saluted Nottingham as the first UK city to adopt a modern day Speakers’ Corner. He said:

“Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing and it matters because I think the strength of Britain is based on it. It’s good that Nottingham is doing this and I think other towns should do it too. It’s a great thing.”

Welcoming Eddie’s backing, Speakers’ Corner Trust’s director Peter Bradley said:

“We’re all really thrilled by Eddie’s support. I’ve always wanted to involve him somehow in this project. He’s not only just about the country’s freest thinker but he’s also living proof that ideas can be fun as well as serious and they can take you on unpredictable and sometimes amazing journeys - and, what’s more, sharing them brings people together.”

Tim Desmond, Chair of the Nottingham Speakers’ Corner Committee, added:

“We see our Speakers’ Corner not only as a new platform for debate in the city but also as a flagship for Nottingham and it’s great to see the positive publicity it’s already attracting. To have someone like Eddie Izzard backing us like this is a wonderful boost for Nottingham.”

To see Eddie Izzard’s interview with Jon Sopel on BBC1’s Politics Show (Sunday 17 February)please click here.

22 February 2008 - The Launch of Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner

Friday 22 February saw the launch of Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner in an open air cermony on Market Square. The speeches formed the focus for a Day for Debate which took place across the city in venues as diverse as the Hermitage Community Centre in Sneinton, the United Hebrew Congregation Synagogue on Shakespeare Street and the Chamber of the Council House on Market Square itself.

The half-hour ceremony was led by the Sheriff of Nottingham, Jeannie Packer, and included contributions from Tim Desmond, chair of the Nottingham Speakers’ Corner Committee(NSCC), SCT’s Director Peter Bradley, and Cllr Jon Collins, Leader of Nottingham City Council.

Adrian Lunga, the Zimbabwean human rights campaigner, reminded the large crowd of the importance to those who are denied them of freedoms which many in Britain take for granted. He remarked that if such an event had taken place in Nottingham’s twin city, Harare, everyone participationg in it would have risked arrest.

The community activist Jackie Morris, a NSCC member, spoke of the importance of the Speakers’ Corner for Nottingham’s communities when she said: “I do as much as I can in my local community, like so many others. But sometimes I feel that no one is listening to the ordinary person. That’s why I am so supportive of Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner. It will give people a place to come and talk about anything that is bothering them, to share their opinions and to understand that their opinion counts and that they matter, that everyone in the City of Nottingham is important and so are their opinions. It will be there for everyone no matter what intellect, background, race or religion. People of Nottingham this is your platform.”

To the delight of the crowd, the event closed with a special video message from Eddie Izzard broadcast on a giant screen - and, by public demand, encored several times over the next couple of hours.

To see Eddie’s message of support for the launch of Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner, please click here.

The ‘Day for Debate’

The launch ceremony was the centrepiece of a Day for Debate across the city, engaging different sectors of the community in debates on topics as diverse as the ethical implications of technological progress, the common ground between Britain’s major faiths and the future of football.

When the day’s programme was announced earlier in the month, NSCC chair Tim Desmond said:

“We see this as a day of celebration for Nottingham on which we can showcase our heritage as a great free-thinking city and our future as a centre of innovation and above all take pride in the people who make up our community.

“We’ve tried to organise a day with something for everyone. We all have strong views but we rarely get the chance to express them. The whole idea of the initiative we’re pioneering in Nottingham is to bring people together to exchange and enjoy ideas and opinions, to learn from each other and to have a greater say in how our lives are run.”

The programme featured:

Listening to Mothers - a discussion at the Red Lion Community Centre in Bulwell on the challenges of parenthood and the needs of young mothers. Representatives of the City Council and the Primary Care Trust came to listen and learn and by the end of the event, the mothers who attended had set up a self-help group.

The Best of Both Worlds - a packed discussion in the Council Chamber in which older people talked about the advantages of modern living and younger people speculated about how life might have been better in past times. The debate, which also compared the generations’ lifestyles and values, was such a success that it overran by half an hour.

Common Ground - a discussion in the United Hebrew Congregation Synagogue on Shakespeare Street about the articles of faith and principle which unite Britain’s mainstream religions, brought together members of Nottingham’s Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Baha’i and Christian communities.

Future Gazing - a discussion in the Council House Ballroom led by four distinguished academics on the direction in which science and technology are taking us, how they may change our lives and how we may have to change our thinking and our values both to exploit and control progress.

Getting the Best Out of Our Neighbourhoods - in the Hermitage Community Centre in Sneinton, in which members of the local community asked, what are the strengths of our community and how can we play to them? What do we need to improve the quality of life in the short, medium and long terms?

The Future of Football - in the Council House Ballroom, uniting Nottingham Forest and Notts County fans and a panel including the former Forest player and manager Frank Clark to ask what’s right and wrong with football? Do the fans get what they deserve? What will it take for England to win again? What changes would make football a better experience? Again, the meeting was so successful that it overran its schedule so that everyone who wanted to contribute to the discussion could do so.

The Future

The launch of Nottingham’s Speakers’ Corner was a great success, attracting an impressive turnout at all its events and winning overwhelmingly positive local press and media attention. National coverage was topped by a Guardian leader, aptly entitled In Praise of Nottingham. In celebrating the city’s historic virtues, the editorial concluded that Nottingham had “fittingly been chosen to pilot a brave new adventure in free speech”.