The 35-mile-long Ouse – which rises in the High Weald, cuts through the chalk of the South Downs, and meanders down to the coast at Newhaven – is but one of several Ouses in England, their name deriving from the Celtic word for water.
Until three months ago, the struggle to save the Ouse by people living in Lewes and the Ouse valley did not significantly differ from campaigns to save other rivers in England, which are under threat. But in February, the Ouse became the first river in the country to have its status as a living entity – with its own rights comparable to those of an individual or company – recognised officially.
The rights of rivers
The Ouse charter of rights opens the door for the river to have a legal status as if it were a living person, a development new in England but gathering pace elsewhere. In New Zealand, the Whanganui River was granted “legal personhood” in 2017, its rights including representation by experienced and knowledgeable advocates.
Bird explains that the charter seeks to rebalance a skewed relationship between nature and human activity in favour of the Ouse, believing this is a necessity “unless you want a drain rather than a river”. He says that “it appears insane to me that a Tesco supermarket building should have more rights than the river on whose bank it is standing”. Asserting the rights of rivers as a general principle is, in his view, much like asserting the rights of women a century or more ago.
She believes that in the past, people in the town thought more about preserving the beautiful landscape of the South Downs surrounding Lewes than they did about the state of the Ouse. She thinks a reason for this may be that keeping a river healthy is a complicated business when facing multiple threats: the slurry, the fertiliser, and “water companies not paying attention to sewage”.
Bird believes that in the past “people felt disconnected from the river”, perhaps because of the overwhelming splendour of the South Downs rising like the green walls of a giant amphitheatre around Lewes. He says that “this changed during the Covid-19 lockdown”, when people spent more time out walking by the river.
The newly elected mayor of Lewes, Emily Clarke, says that there are ‘bits of raw sewage floating in the water’ and people fall ill after being swimming there (Photo: Daniel Leal/AFP)“We won’t be druv [drove]” is a Sussex motto frequently quoted to me. Celebrations of this tradition go back to the Battle of Lewes on 14 May 1264, when Simon de Montfort, the Earl of Leicester and leader of an army of barons and Londoners fighting to limit the power of Henry III, defeated a royal army.
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But the town’s radical tradition really dates from the reformation in the 16th century, when 17 Protestants were burned at the stake during the attempt by Queen Mary to restore Roman Catholicism. In the English Civil War, Lewes was a stronghold for parliament, and after the restoration of the monarchy, its large nonconformist community fought hard to keep its grip on town government.
Moving to Lewes as an exciseman in 1767, he took his first steps into politics and wrote his first pamphlet there. I stayed in the White Hart on the high street, which was the main hub for political discussion and activity in Paine’s day.
Six separate bonfire societies, each with hundreds of members from different districts of the town, process – the word “parade” is avoided as understating the seriousness of the event – down the high street at night. Carrying blazing torches made of wood and canvas dipped in paraffin, they show off carefully sculpted effigies of prominent figures and tableaux showing popular grievances, to be burned at the end of the event.
Members of the Ewhurst and Staplecross Bonfire Society carry their torches through the streets of Lewes on 5 November, 2024 (Photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP)Carter, a member of the Southover Bonfire Society, with 700 members, says: “I think that Lewes has a really strong sense of community because of the bonfire societies. It means I know all my neighbours because we have this fire festival in common every year.” Once Bonfire Night is over, a long period of preparation begins for the next one.
The Bloomsbury Group
Some locals criticise police supervision as excessive. A taxi driver who said he belongs to the Waterloo Bonfire Society complained to me that “we used to put the explosives [probably fireworks] in the effigies before we carried them through the town, but now the police say this is dangerous and we must wait until the end of the event”. The societies have almost entirely abandoned its original anti-popery theme, while continuing to commemorate the 17 local Protestants who were burned alive.
In Lewes and the Ouse valley, such activism is at a peak, boosted since the 1960s by academics from Sussex and Brighton universities. Before they arrived, the beauties of Lewes and the South Downs along with Lewes’s easy access to London by train, attracted intellectuals, the most famous of whom were the Bloomsbury Group.
Easy though it is to produce an idyllic – and perfectly genuine – picture of life in Lewes, it would be misleading. Though the idyll is true for a proportion of the people who live in and around Lewes, the town does not escape chronic national problems besetting the UK.
There is only one bank and two ATMs, which have often run out of cash, on Lewes high street (Photo: Getty)Tom Jeffery, a retired senior civil servant who was born in Lewes and lives on the high street, says: “The bank where my father was manager closed last year and the Lewes Building Society building is now a Gail’s bakery.” Clarke says “there are few normal shops any more, just coffee shops and specialised shops – though a hardware shop has just opened in the high street”.
‘Few well-paying jobs outside retail and hospitality’
Big supermarkets and online shopping has combined with the closure of local branches of banks, building societies and insurance offices to decimate high streets. Also, the spectacularly high cost of leasing or buying property deters retailers, a fact illustrated by the price of the houses advertised in the window of the estate agency in Lewes high street mentioned above. A cottage in “a picturesque central location” will cost the buyer £525,000, while another in the South Downs is priced at £925,000, but this is still lower than many others at the £1.5m mark. These are residential properties, but locals say that a five-year lease for a shop in the high street may cost upwards of £50,000 a year.
Another organisation provides emergency financial aid for people in need of a deposit or in trouble with their rent. At the Christmas collection for the town’s three food banks, a rota of hundreds of collectors from the bonfire societies, football clubs, political parties, church choirs, yoga groups and other organisations stood outside Tesco, Aldi and Waitrose holding up placards saying what items were most needed.
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Read MoreLewes is a centre for progressive politics and social activism, whose elected representatives are mostly Liberal Democrats and Greens. But their agenda is threatened by the rise of Reform UK.
If such a party, with its vigorously anti-environmentalist and climate change scepticism, repeats its success in future in Sussex and everywhere else, those trying to save the Ouse, and protect the local environment in Sussex, may find that they have to fight even harder.
Patrick Cockburn has written a series of essays, illustrated by his son Henry, about the state of the UK. You can read his dispatch from Canterbury here; Dover here; Newcastle here; Herefordshire here; Salford here; and Barrow here. Patrick has also written an essay about the gig economy, which you can read here.
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