Let $G$ be a totally disconnected, locally compact group. A closed subgroup of $G$ is locally normal if its normalizer is open in $G$. We begin an investigation of the structure of the family of closed locally normal subgroups of $G$. Modulo commensurability, this family forms a modular lattice ${\mathcal{L}}{\mathcal{N}}(G)$, called the structure lattice of $G$. We show that $G$ admits a canonical maximal quotient $H$ for which the quasicentre and the abelian locally normal subgroups are trivial. In this situation ${\mathcal{L}}{\mathcal{N}}(H)$ has a canonical subset called the centralizer lattice, forming a Boolean algebra whose elements correspond to centralizers of locally normal subgroups. If $H$ is second-countable and acts faithfully on its centralizer lattice, we show that the topology of $H$ is determined by its algebraic structure (and thus invariant by every abstract group automorphism), and also that the action on the Stone space of the centralizer lattice is universal for a class of actions on profinite spaces. Most of the material is developed in the more general framework of Hecke pairs.

Let $S={\mathop{\rm Sym}(\Omega)$ be the group of all permutations of an infinite set $\Omega$. Extending an argument of Macpherson and Neumann, it is shown that if $U$ is a generating set for $S$ as a group, then there exists a positive integer $n$ such that every element of $S$ may be written as a group word of length at most $n$ in the elements of $U$. Likewise, if $U$ is a generating set for $S$ as a monoid, then there exists a positive integer $n$ such that every element of $S$ may be written as a monoid word of length at most $n$ in the elements of $U$. Some related questions and recent results are noted, and a brief proof is given of a result of Ore's on commutators, which is used in the proof of the above result.