Jonathan Cohen's photos

The Sherlock Holmes Museum is situated within an 1815 townhouse very similar to the 221B described in the stories and is located between 237 and 241 Baker Street. It displays exhibits in period rooms, wax figures and Holmes memorabilia, with the famous study overlooking Baker Street the highlight of the museum.

Tony Allen (born 4 March 1945) is an English comedian and writer. Best known as one of the original "alternative comedians", his artistic career had taken many radical turns. He has been a regular at Speakers' Corner since 1970. In the words of an article that appeared in the New Statesman:"For Allen, every event, meeting or show was a chance to join in. He once heckled a hapless cabaret critic who decided to try his hand at stand-up. In a club packed with comics glad of the opportunity to abuse a critic, it was Allen's line that cut the deepest. During a moment of calm, he gleefully advised: 'Give up the day job!' If anyone was going to get an arts grant for heckling, it was going to be Tony Allen - and that is precisely what he did. The London Arts Board paid him £300 a week for six weeks to be an "advocate heckler" at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. A Summer in the Park is his account of that time. Allen records his attempts to engage with the crowds (or lack of them) and his quest for the 'ultimate spontaneous discourse,' in which performance, oratory and crowd contribution result in some sort of truth. He skilfully weaves his fellow orators, hecklers and park characters into the story, embracing their oddities and often 'borderline' behaviour. The result is a loving, if caustic, portrait of Speakers' Corner and its culture. Occasionally, Allen mentions the history of the place, but his real concern is the current crop of humans who inhabit it. As ever with Allen, the heckling is what matters most. Of a religious speaker berating the crowd for sinning, he gently inquires: 'Was it very bad? What you did?,' then quietly leaves to set up his own pitch with a sign reading: 'Tony Allen: advocate heckler, anarchist parasite, mixed-ability shaman.' In his speeches and debates, he combines old routines with new riffs and ad libbing, and gets as much joy out of the crowd besting him as he does out of besting it. There are also moments of genuine compassion, as when Allen tries to work out what to say to a squaddie who is about to go AWOL after hearing him speak about the dangers of work."

A Speakers’ Corner is an area where open-air public speaking, debate and discussion are allowed. The original and most noted is in the northeast corner of Hyde Park in London, UK. 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 tend to be tolerant and therefore intervene only when they receive a complaint. There are some who contend that the tradition has a connection with the nearby Tyburn gallows, where the condemned man was allowed to speak before being hanged. Be that as it may, 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 described by Karl Marx as the beginning of the English revolution. The Chartist movement used Hyde Park as a point of assembly for workers’ 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. The riots and agitation for democratic reform encouraged some to force the issue of the "right to speak" in Hyde Park. The Parks Regulation Act 1872 delegated the issue of permitting public meetings to the park authorities (rather than central government). Contrary to popular belief, it does not confer a statutory basis for the right to speak at Speakers’ Corner. Parliamentary debates on the Act illustrate that a general principle of being able to meet and speak was not the intention, but that some areas would be permitted to be used for that purpose. Since that time, it has become a traditional site for public speeches and debate, as well as the main site of protest and assembly in Britain. 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. Although many of its regular speakers are non-mainstream, Speakers’ Corner was frequented by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell, C. L. R. James, Walter Rodney, Ben Tillett, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah and William Morris. The day that I visited many of the speakers were proselytizing Islam.

J. Lyons & Co. was a market-dominant British restaurant chain, food manufacturing, and hotel conglomerate founded in 1884. It gradually went out of business in the 1960’s and 1970’s as its various components were sold off. The massive Cumberland Hotel behind Marble Arch was built for J. Lyons in 1930 at the height of the Art Deco mania for everything Egyptian sparked off by the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Lyons’s in-house architect, F.J. Wills, decorated the facade with giant Egyptian figures and created a very odd new order of columns with bulls’ heads on the capitals. A rather nice little detail is that the Egyptians have different expressions on their faces, one having a rather twinkly smile.