What’s a cultural tradition from your country that you love?
I live in Lewes, East Sussex, and nowhere else in the world does 5 November quite like Lewes.
Bonfire here is far more than a fireworks display commemorating the failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. The history is complicated and uncomfortable. The Gunpowder Plot became entangled with the memory of the seventeen Protestant martyrs burned in Lewes during the reign of Mary I, and there is an undeniable history of anti-Catholicism in the traditions that followed. I would rather acknowledge that than pretend it isn’t there.
But the Lewes Bonfire I love is also something else: an extraordinary expression of community, dissent and belonging.
Six principal Bonfire societies take over the town on the Fifth, each fiercely proud of its own identity, costumes, traditions and procession. There are flaming torches, drums, bands, banners, tableaux, fireworks and extraordinary costumes. There is competition over who puts on the best display and, just as importantly, who marches with the greatest discipline. It is spectacular, noisy, smoky, anarchic and intensely organised at the same time.
And it doesn’t simply materialise on 5 November. Hundreds of local people work throughout the year to make it happen. Children grow up in the societies; parents, grandparents and grandchildren march alongside one another. Money is raised for charities. Skills, responsibilities and traditions are passed from one generation to another. The friendships and bonds created through Bonfire feed into other events, organisations, causes and communities throughout the year.
That is perhaps why, as a Green Party councillor, I don’t find my affection for it quite as contradictory as it might first appear. There are perfectly legitimate environmental questions about fire, smoke, fireworks, waste and enormous crowds, and they should be asked. Being environmentally responsible does not require us to strip communities of everything unruly, historic or imperfect.
For me, sustainability is also about sustaining communities.
Lewes Bonfire carries centuries of contradiction within it: religious persecution and religious freedom; authority and dissent; solemn remembrance and glorious disorder; intense rivalry and extraordinary cooperation. Its history shouldn’t be sanitised. It should be understood.
And then, on the evening of 5 November, you stand in a medieval Sussex town while thousands of people march through the streets behind flaming torches, continuing something their parents and grandparents did before them.
Bonfire? The Fifth of November?
For sheer vigour, spectacle and community ownership, there is only one place on earth I would want to be.
Lewes.
I should add that I haven’t merely observed Lewes Bonfire from the pavement.
Before I had even stepped through the door of our new home in central Lewes, I had enrolled in Commercial Square Bonfire Society. For the next decade I dressed as a Confederate soldier, and Bonfire became a family affair: Mum joined us, as did our children, who were only two and four when we started.
Then we moved house to the other side of town — about 400 metres away — and in Lewes that was enough to change societies. We joined Southover, where the dress traditions include fifteenth-century monks and seventeenth-century pirates.
We went all Pirates of the Caribbean.
That experience is part of why Bonfire means so much to me. You do not simply watch it. You join a society, acquire loyalties, costumes, responsibilities and friends, and become part of something that runs through families and generations.
So when I write about the value of Bonfire as a Green Party councillor, I am not looking at the tradition from the outside. I have spent years inside it — marching, carrying a torch, dressing up and taking part with my family.
Leave a Reply