Time was when bonfires and fireworks were the done thing on 5th November. Be it Jacobeans haranguing Catholics, Victorians burning effigies or Elizabethans lighting Roman Candles, the day has been celebrated for centuries. But it used to be hugely more important.
Monday, November 05, 1973
Today I ran home from school. I was so excited. Mum said we have no indoor fireworks. They were amazing at Andrew's party last week. A snake crawled out of the box! We had to wait until it got very dark. Dad cycled home late. Then we went out into the back garden. First he lit the bonfire. It was warm by the flames. We all had sparklers. I made whizzy shapes with mine. Soon there were ten in the bucket. Dad went to the end of the lawn with the rockets. He used his torch to read the label. Then he put them in a milk bottle. They went very high in the sky and exploded. There was yellow and red and gold and white. It was like glitter. I could see Cassiopeia and the Plough. We stood much closer to the pyramids and fountains. They blew out steam and smoke. Mum hopes her flower bed will be OK. Dad used a nail to bang the Catherine wheel into the fence. It looked quite small. It spun round clockwise and fizzed. The second wheel got stuck and didn't move. What a waste of fifty pence! Mum came out with bread rolls and sausages. I had ketchup in mine. There were only two bangers in the box. I was scared they might be jumping round the lawn. Nextdoor also had rockets. Theirs made red and green blobs. It sounded like half the road was having fireworks. Tomorrow we are having a bonfire at Cubs.
When I was small it was all about doing it yourself, which meant having a display in your back garden. Selection boxes were relatively inexpensive, not to mention inadequately policed by modern standards. The government had to play Public Information Films on TV for days in advance to make sure the population didn't get maimed. Children still made guys and wheeled them around on go-karts, soliciting money from strangers. And every November 5th - hardly ever the days either side - the skies above Britain lit up with shop-bought explosions.
Gradually all that changed with the shift to organised displays. They'd always existed but they became more important, a chance for councils to lure families away from garden-based danger and stand in parks behind carefully-measured ropes. They delivered a spectacle much bigger (and much longer) than anything you could create for yourself, plus they brought the community together, so it was a win-win.
For many years East Londoners were spoiled for big displays, so much so that you could watch two free professional spectacles on consecutive nights, but the pick of the crop was always the extravaganza on Blackheath. Here's what I wrote about the event in 2012.
Saturday, November 03, 2012
While other London council displays fall by the wayside, Lewisham continues to fund the annual pyrotechnic extravaganza on Blackheath. A hundred thousand normally turn up, some lured by the fairground, others by the bar, but most by the opportunity to stand in open darkness to watch thousands of pounds go up in smoke. Volunteers go round with buckets to try to recoup some of the costs, but they're all too easy to miss, and few seem to give more than few coins anyway. Saturday night's skies were crisp and clear, ideal for watching the lights of planes descending across the area on their approach to Heathrow. The crowds came well wrapped, displaying the latest in fashionable woolly headgear. Families and youthful groups were much in evidence, as well as couples huddling up against one another for warmth. Officially the display starts at eight, but in truth it's always five past to allow for any stragglers to take up position. A series of bangs and flashes ensued, you know the score, plus a decent mix of blasts, cracks and whizzes. Everyone gawped, and several waved their cameras as if some blurry image or video could possibly capture the all-enveloping experience. Plenty of spectacle, plenty of variety, and continuing just long enough to make everyone feel like it had been well worth coming. Sixteen minutes, if you were counting, which is fractionally less than last year. And after the fiery climax came the rush for home, or the dash for the funfair, or a lot of hanging around attempting in vain to regroup in the dark. Firework displays may be more common than they used to be, but there's still something magic about this collective spectacle on the heath. Long may London's most popular display continue.
But it hasn't. The writing was on the wall as early as 2010 when Greenwich council withdrew funding leaving Lewisham to shoulder the burden alone. The appearance of bucket-shakers didn't contribute much to the overall cost, neither could sponsors make up the shortfall, and alternative council priorities inevitably put the event on the endangered list. What finally killed Blackheath was the pandemic, specifically that not hosting a display in 2020 or 2021 made it much easier not to revive things in 2022 when money was even more scarce. And Blackheath isn't alone. Austerity slimmed down London's list of free public displays from eight in 2013 to three in 2019, and since then there've been none at all.
2013: Blackheath, Brockwell Park, Chiswick, Lord Mayor's Show, Southwark, Victoria Park, Wanstead Flats, Waltham Forest 2016: Blackheath, Lord Mayor's Show, Southwark, Victoria Park, Waltham Forest, Wanstead Flats, Wembley 2019: Blackheath, Royal Docks, Victoria Park 2023: extinct
I blame George Osborne for tightening the flow of cash to local government and preventing it from raising more. I curse Eric Pickles for forcing councils to pare their services to the essentials and his successors for squeezing further still. I despair at the goodwill lost, the resources binned and the culture destroyed. And I weep that after a decade of narrowed horizons we now live in a society where spending money on fripperies like fireworks has become unthinkable because what little remains is needed to prop up basic services, and nobody now expects any better.
I also blame the increasing Americanisation of Hallowe'en for edging out our home-grown autumn festival. These days it's all about spooks, skeletons and spiders, because when you're seven that's far more fun than standing in the dark for fifteen minutes while adults set off explosions. Scary costumes and the accumulation of sugary treats will always wipe the floor with the possibility to maybe hold a sparkler, plus dressing up and candy bags are a heck of a lot more affordable than a box of imported explosives. Also Hallowe'en comes first by five days so you get all that build-up rising to a frenzied social peak, and then this weekend everyone's spent and so is all their money.
So what I did yesterday, to properly feel the ennui, was head down to Blackheath for 8pm.
Saturday, November 04, 2023
I've come down to Blackheath on the night its big firework display would have been happening, but isn't. The weather's decent - not too cold, not too damp, a glimpse of Jupiter through the clouds - but nobody's turned up. I cross the steady stream of headlights by the Tea Hut and follow the unlit path straight across the heart of the heath. The grass should be thronging with families, couples and excitable youth but instead it's just me surrounded by a cloak of darkness. The sky's not entirely firework-free, with occasional glitterbursts lighting up the skyline in multiple directions, because there'll always be pyromaniac suburban dads with money to burn. But it's not the same as a full-on prolonged whoosh above your head, music pumping, and the happy crush of thousands of well-wrapped punters gazing upwards. It is in fact incredibly disconcerting to be here, gazing out towards points of light in the distance and hoping there's nothing, or nobody, lurking unseen in the immediate gloom. I quicken my pace towards the line where the security barrier would have been, and beyond that the launch zone where all the magic happened, and eventually reach the safety of the lamplit path. It should have been amazing standing here tonight, accumulating memories and revelling in the collective joy, but the spectacle's never coming back. Right time, right place, wrong future.
There'll always be firework displays on November 5th because if you really want it you want it you can pay for it. But as a country it feels like we're moving on, nudged into celebrating something different, and are allowing an affordable autumn treat to slip out of reach. After four centuries this may finally be the Bonfire of the Bonfires.
Today I ran home from school. I was so excited. Mum said we have no indoor fireworks. They were amazing at Andrew's party last week. A snake crawled out of the box! We had to wait until it got very dark. Dad cycled home late. Then we went out into the back garden. First he lit the bonfire. It was warm by the flames. We all had sparklers. I made whizzy shapes with mine. Soon there were ten in the bucket. Dad went to the end of the lawn with the rockets. He used his torch to read the label. Then he put them in a milk bottle. They went very high in the sky and exploded. There was yellow and red and gold and white. It was like glitter. I could see Cassiopeia and the Plough. We stood much closer to the pyramids and fountains. They blew out steam and smoke. Mum hopes her flower bed will be OK. Dad used a nail to bang the Catherine wheel into the fence. It looked quite small. It spun round clockwise and fizzed. The second wheel got stuck and didn't move. What a waste of fifty pence! Mum came out with bread rolls and sausages. I had ketchup in mine. There were only two bangers in the box. I was scared they might be jumping round the lawn. Nextdoor also had rockets. Theirs made red and green blobs. It sounded like half the road was having fireworks. Tomorrow we are having a bonfire at Cubs.
While other London council displays fall by the wayside, Lewisham continues to fund the annual pyrotechnic extravaganza on Blackheath. A hundred thousand normally turn up, some lured by the fairground, others by the bar, but most by the opportunity to stand in open darkness to watch thousands of pounds go up in smoke. Volunteers go round with buckets to try to recoup some of the costs, but they're all too easy to miss, and few seem to give more than few coins anyway. Saturday night's skies were crisp and clear, ideal for watching the lights of planes descending across the area on their approach to Heathrow. The crowds came well wrapped, displaying the latest in fashionable woolly headgear. Families and youthful groups were much in evidence, as well as couples huddling up against one another for warmth. Officially the display starts at eight, but in truth it's always five past to allow for any stragglers to take up position. A series of bangs and flashes ensued, you know the score, plus a decent mix of blasts, cracks and whizzes. Everyone gawped, and several waved their cameras as if some blurry image or video could possibly capture the all-enveloping experience. Plenty of spectacle, plenty of variety, and continuing just long enough to make everyone feel like it had been well worth coming. Sixteen minutes, if you were counting, which is fractionally less than last year. And after the fiery climax came the rush for home, or the dash for the funfair, or a lot of hanging around attempting in vain to regroup in the dark. Firework displays may be more common than they used to be, but there's still something magic about this collective spectacle on the heath. Long may London's most popular display continue.
I've come down to Blackheath on the night its big firework display would have been happening, but isn't. The weather's decent - not too cold, not too damp, a glimpse of Jupiter through the clouds - but nobody's turned up. I cross the steady stream of headlights by the Tea Hut and follow the unlit path straight across the heart of the heath. The grass should be thronging with families, couples and excitable youth but instead it's just me surrounded by a cloak of darkness. The sky's not entirely firework-free, with occasional glitterbursts lighting up the skyline in multiple directions, because there'll always be pyromaniac suburban dads with money to burn. But it's not the same as a full-on prolonged whoosh above your head, music pumping, and the happy crush of thousands of well-wrapped punters gazing upwards. It is in fact incredibly disconcerting to be here, gazing out towards points of light in the distance and hoping there's nothing, or nobody, lurking unseen in the immediate gloom. I quicken my pace towards the line where the security barrier would have been, and beyond that the launch zone where all the magic happened, and eventually reach the safety of the lamplit path. It should have been amazing standing here tonight, accumulating memories and revelling in the collective joy, but the spectacle's never coming back. Right time, right place, wrong future.
