India, Oct. 13 -- In the summer of 1866, the Reform League, a movement campaigning to extend the vote to working men, called a meeting in Hyde Park, central London. That meeting, scheduled for July 23, had been barred, and the park's gates were locked. Part of the crowd, according to an account in the book Defining the Victorian Nation, broke down the railings and a few fought the police.

A 2019 paper in the journal Historical Geography argued that the protest for the vote, in effect, became a public argument over who could use the park and for what purpose.

Six years after that 1866 protest, the UK Parliament passed the Parks Regulation Act 1872. The north-eastern corner of the park, near Marble Arch and Oxford Street, called Speakers'...