The paper focuses on Speaker’s Corner, a public sphere with origins in the criminal culture of 18th-century London. The paper provides a basis for discussion of the use of ethnographic approaches to explore criminological topics and highlights some of the dangers involved in basing analysis upon the lived context of the researched. Such an approach is more often interested in the social construction of particular contexts rather than social structures existing independently of agents. It is not enough merely to include social structures within the research process. Structures should be analyzed within the dense network of distinctive social relations so that the particular structure under investigation can be seen as a qualitative moment of those social relations. History should be read not in a linear manner, but dialectically. The social context and the distinctiveness of different epochs both carry with them a permanence which resides in the contradictory foundations of capitalist production. Notes, references