Myk Zeitlin attended Speakers’ Corner from 1977 to 1983, after seeing an advert in Peace News. His first impression was that Speakers’ Corner was “an offshoot of London zoo.” Myk’s model, aged 20, was Franz Kafka who worked in an insurance office by day and was a radical by night. He was inspired by Tony Allen’s anarchist critique of work to give up his “boring office job” in 1980 and become “full time” at Speakers’ Corner. He busked at Marble Arch and heckled a lot. Most of all Myk was interested in the social scene, which embraced intellectuals like Hungarian Alfred Reynolds. He thinks today’s orators are far more ideological and religious than in the 1970s. Myk recalls “Saint Paul” Hunt’s Sufi parable about a man picking up a strange looking stone, bearing the words “why do you seek more knowledge when you don’t put into practice what you already know.” Myk moved on partly because he wanted to put what he had learnt into practice.

Audio of Myk