London has a tradition of public “soapbox” speaking on Sundays at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. According to one travel writer, “Tens of thousands of people come to Speaker’s Corner once or twice a year, thousands more come five or 10 times a year, and hundreds come virtually through hell or high water.”

It’s an opportunity to speak your mind on any topic — although you can expect to be heckled.

Listening to the speakers at last week’s Central Iowa Activist Awards sponsored by this newspaper, one couldn’t help thinking that such leaders and such messages should be heard by more citizens more often.

It would be wonderful if downtown Des Moines had a place and a time when ordinary folks could drop by to hear Jonathan Wilson talk about prejudice, or Roxanne Conlin talk about feminism or David Hurd personalize his global environmental concerns with details from a recent trip on the Amazon River.

Central Iowa has any number of remarkable visionaries and leaders, but no venue in which they can be heard by much of anyone but their fellow believers. Preaching to the unconverted, that’s how real progress is made.

This would feel so much more like a vibrant city, a place where important issues are engaged by one and all, if we made it easy for downtown workers to hear Becky Morelock talk about the struggles of the neighborhoods or Byron Jarrett Sr. deliver his message of hope for young people headed for trouble.

And the opinions of college students such as Drake University’s Sarah Mayberry, Ben Parrott and Danielle Sturgis should be heard, too, whether it’s downtown or on the Drake campus.

Of course, we couldn’t match the spirit of venerable Speaker’s Corner overnight – or maybe ever. This being polite Iowa, we wouldn’t be comfortable with an overabundance of heckling. We would tend to listen politely and then tell our colleagues back at the office what we really thought.

But a more reserved version would work just fine.

And some weekday lunch hour sounds more appropriate than Sunday. It’s going to be a long time before downtown Des Moines is the place to hang out on Sundays.

But that’s not a problem, either. We keep talking about the 65,000 workers downtown, and there must be enough intellectual curiosity among that group to motivate a few speakers.

Would our thinkers have the nerve to just start talking without a formal setting and justification? Would ordinary people stop to listen? Wouldn’t it be great to find out?