Donald Trump, flaming crosses and smuggler uniforms: the strange sights of Lewes Bonfire

This weekend, the sleepy market town of Lewes in Sussex played host to around 40,000 visiting pyromaniacs. Its annual fireworks and bonfire display is Britain’s largest, boasting six separate bonfires and firework displays making up what has become one of the most celebrated Guy Fawkes events in the world. We sent photographer Craig Gibson down to document the cult-like happenings exclusively for It’s Nice That.

“The atmosphere was generally positive, with cheering, waving and effigy booing,” Craig tells us. “The whole town reeked of burnt wood and gunpowder. There were a lot of hot colours from flares and torches and the occasional flash of white from the deafening bangers, which were being thrown on the ground. I was dodging torches while I was shooting!”

Marking not only Guy Fawkes night and Remembrance Day but also the burning of 17 Protestant martyrs from the area by Queen Mary I during the Marion Persecutions, Lewes Bonfire began in the early morning, with the throwing of bangers or “rooks”.

It’s not known quite why the usually uneventful town has become the unofficial hub of Britain’s 5 November celebrations, but anti-papal processions were recorded in the town as far back as 1679, and, by the 19th Century, the local press were recording “lively” annual celebrations. By 1847, London police were brought to Lewes to help manage what had by then become something of a health and safety nightmare.

In line with hundreds of years of tradition, over the day and into night of the fifth, 17 lit crosses were marched through the town. Flaming barrels coated in tar were raced down the town’s high street and thrown with crosses into the river Ouse. The bonfire societies — Cliffe, Commercial Square, Lewes Borough, Southover, South Street, Waterloo and Nevill Juvenile — moved slowly around the town dressed in striped “smuggler uniforms”. “The guilds all split up at their own meeting points in the town then eventually join up for the final parade down the high street,” Craig explains.

Huge, provocative effigies were hauled through the streets for Lewes’ fiery, chaotic parade. “There were masses of torches, masks and striped jumpers. Vikings, Romans, Native Americans, bagpipers, war veterans, suffragettes, a Pope with a lizard tail and a grim reaper. The floats were mainly Donald Trump-based, and there was one of Teresa May, Boris, Cameron and Farage.”

While it is common for political figures to be caricatured as effigies or tableaux, organisers said it was the first time that one singular figure had attracted so much attention. Depictions of Trump included the US presidential hopeful as an egg-headed Humpty Dumpty pledging to keep Mexicans out of the US by the building of a Berlin-style wall, riding a rodeo bull caped with an American flag and as a clown.