Notting Hill Carnival
Europe's biggest street party began as an indoor event in a London town hall in 1959, started by a woman who fought for Black Britons' dignity.
Published
.jpg){kind=link}
Quick Facts
- When
- August bank holiday weekend, Sunday and Monday
- Indoor ancestor
- Claudia Jones's Caribbean Carnival, St Pancras Town Hall, January 1959
- Street origins
- 1966 children's fayre organised by Rhaune Laslett, with Russell Henderson's steel band
- Sunday
- Children's Day, with younger masqueraders and family bands
- Monday
- The main parade of costumed 'mas' bands, floats and steel pan
- Sound
- Calypso, soca, reggae, dub, jungle and more, played from towering sound system stacks
- Food
- Jerk chicken, rice and peas, goat curry, patties and fried plantain
- Pauses
- Cancelled in 2020 and 2021 in its usual form because of Covid
The carnival that started indoors
Before there was a single lorry or feather headdress, there was a cold January night in 1959 and a hall with a stage. Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born journalist who founded the newspaper West Indian Gazette, organised a Caribbean Carnival at St Pancras Town Hall. The timing mattered. The previous summer, racist attacks in Notting Hill had shaken the area, and Jones wanted to give the Caribbean community a celebration of joy and pride. The BBC broadcast the event. Jones died on Christmas Eve 1964. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery, near Karl Marx's tomb, and is often called the mother of Notting Hill Carnival.
A children's fayre that took over the streets
The street version arrived in 1966, when local activist Rhaune Laslett organised a fayre for neighbourhood children. Russell Henderson's steel band played, and the music soon spilled out of the venue and onto the roads. The procession that followed became the carnival's seed. Through the 1970s it grew rapidly, with more bands, more sound systems and bigger crowds. Leslie Palmer, who became its director in 1973, helped shape its growth. It was never tidy. In 1976 tensions between young Black Londoners and the police erupted into serious clashes on the Monday. The event survived and eventually earned its place as an established fixture of the capital.
What actually happens on the day
Sunday is Children's Day, when younger dancers in sequins and feathers take over the route. Monday brings the full parade, a loop of several miles around the streets near Ladbroke Grove, with bands built around a theme and a lorry blasting soca. The costumes are called mas, short for masquerade, a tradition carried over from Trinidad's carnival. Bands spend months designing and sewing. Some dancers wear towering backpack structures, others bikini-and-feather sets in glittering colour. Meanwhile, steel bands compete and play. The pan has been part of the carnival from the start, and the sound of a full steel orchestra rolling down a London street is one of the event's great moments.
Sound systems, jerk smoke and bass in your ribcage
Along the route and in the side streets, sound systems stack speakers into walls. Each has its own crowd and style, from roots reggae and dub to jungle, drum and bass and soca. Standing near one, you feel the bass in your chest before you hear the tune. Then there's the food. Jerk chicken sizzles on oil-drum barbecues, and stalls sell rice and peas, curried goat, patties and fried plantain. Plenty of local residents treat the weekend as a street-front picnic, with neighbours pulling out chairs and cooking from their doorsteps. The festival is often described as the biggest street festival in Europe, with crowds regularly estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
A carnival with a conscience
Carnival has always carried political weight. Its roots lie in Caribbean traditions of celebrating emancipation and mocking those in power, and in a community fighting for its place in London. In 2017, after the Grenfell Tower fire, the carnival marked the loss with a silence and green hearts, a reminder that this is a neighbourhood's party as well as a national one. There is a friendly rivalry with other British carnivals too. Leeds West Indian Carnival, which began in 1967, has its own long-running claim to fame, and cities like Bristol, Luton and Leicester hold their own events. Notting Hill remains the biggest, but its partners elsewhere like to remind it that the country's carnival culture doesn't begin and end in west London.
Notable people
- Claudia Jones
- Rhaune Laslett
- Russell Henderson
- Leslie Palmer
- Frank Crichlow
Keep exploring
Bonfire Night
Published
Every year Britain burns a man who tried to blow up Parliament, and in Lewes the fire extends to flaming barrels in the river and a march of thousands.
Tartan and the Kilt
Published
The oldest known tartan in Britain was stuffed into a pot of Roman coins near Falkirk, and the kilt you picture is younger than the Union Jack.
The Highland Games
Published
A Scottish tradition where grown adults hurl a tree trunk end over end, pipers battle for glory, and the monarch might be watching from the stand.