Lewes

On the fifth of November, torchlit processions fill the streets with fire, effigies and a defiance that has burnt every year since the 1600s. Lewes takes Bonfire Night more seriously than anywhere else in England — and that intensity carries through the year in its bookshops, breweries and independent streak.

Lewes's Bonfire Night is run by six bonfire societies with seventeenth-century roots, drawing crowds several times the town's population; the tradition commemorates both Guy Fawkes and the seventeen Protestant martyrs burned here in the 1550s, with flaming tar barrels rolled through the streets and seventeen burning crosses carried in their memory. Beyond the fire, the town occupies a strategic gap where the Ouse cuts the South Downs chalk: a Norman castle overlooks the medieval twittens — narrow alleys threading off the high street — and Harvey's has brewed Sussex ale in its Victorian riverside brewhouse since 1790, the brewery tap serving as the town's front parlour. Tom Paine lived and argued here, the Bloomsbury set's houses lie nearby, and Glyndebourne's opera and the South Downs Way both sit within reach — radical dissent and high culture sharing one small hill.