Five... historic London ceremonies
Blessed be the river
Hi and welcome to your belated weekend newsletter…
This edition’s a handful of rituals and ceremonies bound up in the history of London — some of them are traditions that would sound elaborately strange enough even if they’d been left behind in whatever century and circumstances birthed them. Some of them are all the stranger for being relatively new. All of them you can still partake in today.
And there are a lot that didn’t make the list. There’s a helpful visual aid from Adam Dant, in the form of an illustrated calendar of London’s weirdest annual events, which might give you a sense of how many archaic traditions there are to choose from. Swan upping, pig-ditch-kicking (no pigs actually harmed), and the rent ceremony where you pay five apples and five bouquets of flowers to guarantee your right to keep using the Protected Lands are all going to have to wait for a part II.
The Easter Monday Chair-Lifting
‘For the last 40 years or so, the Blackheath Morris Men have been in Greenwich on Easter Monday, offering a uniquely uplifting experience.
And by uplifting, we mean they'll sit you on a florally-festooned chair and hoist you above their shoulders, between dances. Provided you're a woman, that is…’
— Will Noble, The Age-Old Ritual of Chair-Lifting on Easter Monday (2025)
On 21st April 2025, you can once again catch the Blackheath Morris Men welcoming spring in with a flourish. The south London group make the rounds of Greenwich landmarks like the Cutty Sark, Royal Naval College — plus a local pub or three — to dance, jangle bells, and lift volunteering women to the sky in a chair. It’s a ritual harking back to medieval times, but chair-lifting nearly didn’t survive the years — in the 1700s Gentlemen’s Magazine called it ‘improper and indecent’ and called for it to be abolished.
If you want to join this year, whether to welcome in the spring or be scandalised by the impropriety, visit the Blackheath Morris Men website for the itinerary.
Beating the Bounds
Ascension Day (that’s the 40th day after Easter) feels like the right time to gather together a group of your local friends and clergymen, and re-assert your territory by processing around your parish and hitting the perimeter of it with a large stick or ‘wand’. This is Beating the Bounds.
While it isn’t London-specific, and you can find this scattered around English parishes, the most famous might be the ceremony that takes place in the City of London, in the parish of All Hallows by the Tower. A group of schoolkids, clergy, and Masters of various Livery companies form the Beating Party each year — processing along the borders of the parish, pausing at each boundary mark to beat it with a stick and praying for protection for the land. The All Hallows by the Tower version of the ancient ritual comes with some added terrain challenges, and a regular staging of a historic battle:
‘Because the southern border of the parish is halfway across the Thames, the beating party… takes a boat out into the river, where a student strikes the watery marker from the safety of the vessel. It used to be that they were dangled off the side to perform their duty, but safety concerns have put paid to that…
…Every three years the church's ceremony includes a 'battle' with the Governor and Yeomen Warders of the Tower of London, marking the time in 1698 when a dispute with the Tower of London over where the boundary lay, erupted into a riot…’
— James Drury, Beating the Bounds is one of London’s oddest traditions (2015)