Anthony Gomm’s Catholic upbringing made his early visits to Speakers’ Corner, with its free thinkers and atheists, a profound shock. “It became my open university,” he says. He has been a regular visitor since 1959, listening to speakers like Donald Soper and Jacobus Van Dyn. He remembers a hippy who spoke about the joys of LSD in the late 1960s. Anthony also witnessed open air speaking at Tower Hill and remembers someone pushing an elderly Donald Soper off his stand. Nowadays the majority of the speakers in Hyde Park are religious, which puts him off. Contemporary speakers like Heiko Khoo and “Jay”, a Christian theologian who can quote the Quran chapter and verse, still impress him.