Lewes Bonfire Night: Everything you need to know about this year's world famous event

The night of celebrations sees six separate Lewes Bonfire Society’s all celebrating Guy Fawkes night in various parts of the town and is one of the biggest November 5 events in the country.

The festival is known as either the Lewes Bonfire Night Celebrations, Lewes Bonfire Night or just simply the Fifth and sees all six society's showcase their own processions, traditions, costumes, fire sites and fireworks.

There will be 30 plus processions during the Lewes Bonfire Night Celebrations, intermingling with each other through the narrow streets of Lewes with the Bonfire Night Celebration Processions starting around 5pm and finishing about 1am.

Each Lewes Bonfire Society will have their own routes, except the grand which is around 9pm, when five of the Lewes Bonfire Societies will join up and march back through the town.

This part of the procession can take an hour or so to pass, and then the societies will return to their own procession routes - complete with their individual traditions, costumes, bonfire, fireworks, tableaux, and set pieces to their own fire sites.

The night is also infamous for the burning and destroying of models of recent cultural figures to ‘highlight a problem or a grievance that the common man has with the powers’.

In 2021, Guardian columnist Zoe Williams saw models of Dominic Cummings, wearing glasses, having an eye test and Matt Hancock, with a naked woman draped across him, being engulfed in flames on the streets of the East Sussex town.

The event celebrates the fall of Guy Fawkes, the failure of the Gunpowder Plot and remembering the Seventeen Martyrs that were burnt near the Lewes War Memorial.

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, was a failed assassination attempt against King James VI by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby who sought to restore the Catholic monarchy to England after decades of persecution against Catholics.

The Lewes Martyrs were a group of 17 Protestants who were burned at the stake in Lewes between 1555 and 1557 – as part of the Marian persecutions of Protestants during the reign of Mary I.

On the day of the event the roads in the town are closed, meaning that there are no parking facilities. Those using public transport are likely to find that it is very crowded and that they will have to queue for long periods before arriving in Lewes.

The Lewes Bonfire Council say the night in Lewes is particularly unsuitable for younger children who are unlikely to get a view of the celebrations and who may find the event confusing and frightening.

Children in pushchairs and buggies are particularly vulnerable to injury due to the density of the crowds.

The noise and density of the crowds also makes the evening entirely unsuitable for pets.

For more information on the event, visit the Lewes Bonfire Council website.