A 700-year-old ceremony that London's never got boar-ed of.
The Boar's Head Ceremony started out as a peppercorn rent payment/meaty thank you from the butchers of the City of London, who, in 1343, were allotted a Fleet-side parcel of land where they could clean and dispose of any 'beast entrails'. To show their appreciation to then-Lord Mayor of London, John Hamond, the Butchers' Guild, now the Worshipful Company of Butchers, presented Hamond (we like to think he was aptly nicknamed 'Hammy') with a boar's head, for the centrepiece of a winter feast. As these traditions sometimes do, it stuck.
Though the banquet at Mansion House was natural off limits to the rabble, anyone could watch the prized boar's head — jaws jammed cartoonishly with a sphere of fruit — paraded from Butchers' Hall to the Mayor's residence. The head these days is a well-glossed papier-mâché facsimile, and frankly looks all the more agreeable for it.
For many years, the procession took place in the run-up to Christmas, but now it's been shifted to late winter/early spring, this year falling on Wednesday 18 March 2026. Gather outside Butchers' Hall at 87 Bartholomew Close a little before 2.30pm, and you'll see the boar's bonce carried out on a litter by blue gown-clad freemen and women. Led by a beadle, the head is then piped/drummed on its way by the Epping Forest Pipe Band Mayor-wards — this year, Lady Mayor Dame Susan Langley. The butchers will have already enjoyed a bangers and mash lunch, but you're not invited to that bit, so maybe grab a Gregg's sausage roll.
Until the 1820s you could've gone for a post-ceremony jar in the Boar's Head Tavern on nearby Eastcheap — as featured in Shakespeare plays — but someone went and demolished it, the swines.
In Oxford, another centuries-old boar's head procession plays out each year at Queen's College; this one still happens at Christmastime, and is heralded by the Boar's Head Carol. The boar's head, as far as we can make out, is genuine.
Boar's Head Ceremony, gather outside Butchers' Hall from around 2.30pm on 18 March, to follow the boar's head as it's processed to Mansion House, arriving around 3pm. It's free to watch.
