Bowdon Bonfire runs on Friday 6 November 2026, gates at 6pm, with a drone light show new for this year. Early bird tickets are £15 an adult and £8 a child.

Bonfire night itself falls on Thursday 5 November 2026. The display almost everyone in Altrincham means is Bowdon Bonfire, and it runs the night after, on Friday 6 November 2026, at Bowdon Cricket, Hockey and Squash Club on South Downs Road, WA14 3DT.

It is already on sale. That matters, because the club’s own website does not say so.

The 2026 details, confirmed

The club’s 2026 ticket listing gives the date as Friday 6 November 2026, running 6pm to 10pm, with gates at 6pm. The listing was created in April 2026 and was last edited on 3 September, so it is current rather than left over.

The advertised bill is one bonfire, three firework displays and a drone light show, plus a children’s funfair, barbecues, licensed bars, toffee apples and sweet stalls.

The running order

Time What happens
6pm Gates open
7pm Children’s firework display
7.20pm Drone light show, new for 2026
7.40pm Bonfire lit
8.10pm Second firework display
8.45pm Grand finale

That is not last year’s timetable. In 2025 the club lit the bonfire at 7.20pm and ran the second display at 8pm, with no drone show at all. The drone slot has pushed the bonfire and the second display about twenty minutes later, so if you are working to memory from last year you will be early for the fire and late for nothing.

The first display is deliberately quieter and aimed at younger children. The club says the second display and the grand finale “may not be suitable for younger people due to the higher noise volume”. If you have a nervous child or a nervous dog, the 7pm slot is the one to plan around.

Tickets and what they actually cost

Two price tiers are loaded. Early bird is on sale now; the standard tier is listed but not yet released, which means early bird will close at some point before the night and nobody has published when.

Ticket Early bird (on sale now) Standard (not yet released)
Adult, 14 and over £15.00 plus £1.58 fee, £16.58 £18.00 plus £1.78 fee, £19.78
Child, 3 to 14 £8.00 plus £1.12 fee, £9.12 £10.00 plus £1.25 fee, £11.25
Family, 2 adults and 2 children £35.00 plus £2.90 fee, £37.90 £45.00 plus £3.56 fee, £48.56

Under 3s go in free. Booking early is worth £3.20 a head on an adult ticket and £10.66 on a family, which is a real saving rather than a nudge.

Two things to know before you book. The listing says no refunds. And the age bands overlap: it sells a child ticket for ages 3 to 14 and an adult ticket for 14 and over, so if you have a 14 year old, ask the club which one it wants rather than guessing.

Gate prices for 2026 have not been published. In 2025 the club charged £10 a child, £20 an adult and £50 a family on the gate, against advance prices identical to this year’s early bird. On that pattern, turning up and paying at the gate costs roughly a third more.

The club’s own website still advertises last year

Go to bowdonclub.com/bonfire today and it headlines “57TH ANNUAL BONFIRE / FRIDAY 7TH NOVEMBER 2025”, with the 2025 programme and the 2025 gate prices underneath. The string “2026” does not appear on it anywhere.

That page is not wrong so much as unrefreshed, and it is the page search engines send you to. The 2026 date and running order live on the ticket listing, not on the club’s own site. If you find a different date anywhere, that is where it came from.

The same page also contradicts itself on the count, calling the night both the 57th and the 56th annual bonfire in the same breath, which is why this page does not put a number on the 2026 edition. What is not in doubt is that the club has been firing rockets off that ground since 1968, and that the night is a fundraiser for a not for profit sports club rather than a commercial event.

Getting there, and the parking problem

The ground is on South Downs Road in Bowdon, about a twenty minute walk uphill from Altrincham Interchange.

There is no parking on site, including for blue badge holders. The club states it plainly: “Disabled and public parking is available locally but unfortunately we are unable to provide this facility on site.” South Downs Road and the streets around it are residential, they are narrow, and several thousand people arrive within the same half hour.

The realistic options are the town centre car parks and the tram, then the walk up. Our Altrincham parking page has the tariffs, the free periods and which car parks lock their barriers overnight, which is the detail people get caught by on a night that ends at 10pm.

If anything is dug up on the approach roads that week, it will show on our Altrincham roadworks and travel page, which is refreshed from the national street works register.

On the night

Bars serve alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks, food stalls do barbecue burgers and hot food, and there are fairground rides including a carousel. The club takes cash and card, which is worth knowing because plenty of club events near here have gone card only.

Everywhere else in Trafford

Bowdon is the only display anywhere in the borough with a confirmed 2026 date, on any ticketing platform, as things stand today.

  • Urmston Sports Club, Moorside Road, ran a bonfire and fireworks night in early November 2025. Its website carries no events listing at all and points visitors at Facebook, so there is nothing to confirm for 2026.
  • Trafford MV RFCC at MacPherson Park, Finney Bank Road in Sale, ran a bonfire night in November 2025 with tickets sold only over the bar. Its events page today lists one thing, the club’s beer festival on 18 and 19 September, and the 2025 bonfire announcement has been taken down.

Neither is cancelled. Neither is confirmed. Both are the sort of club night that gets announced three or four weeks out on social media and nowhere else.

Trafford Council does not run a fireworks display. Its website lists 2,752 pages and its events section is entirely library reading groups, knitting groups and children’s story times. There is no council display, no council bonfire, and no borough wide list of displays to check. That is why aggregator sites recycling last year’s dates rank so well for this search: there is no official list for them to be wrong about.

What this page will say next

If the standard ticket tier goes live, or the early bird sells out, or either of the other two clubs announces, this page gets updated with the date and the source. Until then the position is simple: Bowdon on Friday 6 November, tickets on sale, everything else unannounced.

Checked on 4 September 2026 against the club’s own ticket listing and website, Urmston Sports Club, Trafford MV RFCC and Trafford Council’s published site index.