Notting Hill Carnival: a celebration of Europe's largest street festival

‘September 1966 will be a landmark in Notting Hill,’ presciently splashed the front page of The Grove newsletter. ‘For the first time this century – apart from a Bank Holiday entertainment that survived until the First World War – Notting Hill is to have its own Fair. Or Fayre, as they seem to be calling it.’

58 years later, somewhere between one and three million people will cram into the roads, venues, pavements and parks of Notting Hill, a now upmarket part of northwest London, to celebrate, perform, dance, ‘wine’, eat, drink or simply marvel. This seismic event, which takes place over the August Bank Holiday weekend, directly stems from the events of 1966. The main organiser of Notting Hill Fayre was Rhaune Laslett, the president of London Free School. It was envisaged as a reinvention of the old trade fairs of the district while responding to a lack of integration in the area. “We felt that although West Indians, Africans, Irish and many other nationalities all live in a very congested area,” she told the paper, “there is very little communication between us. If we can infect them with a desire to participate then this can only have good results.”

Alex Dayo and fellow drummers, including members of his band Zantogola, on a street corner during Notting Hill Carnival

The program spanned nine days. It included an ‘Evening of International Songs and Dances’, ‘Old Time Music Hall, with Jimmy Calderbank’, a folk evening (singers included Bob Davenport, Sidney Carter and Nadia Cattouse) and a ‘Carnival Dance’ featuring Caribbean music (artists unspecified), New Orleans jazz and an Irish céilidh band. A pageant organised for the first Sunday was a strange hodgepodge, including (according to various sources) children in fancy dress as European royalty, Nigerian drummer Ginger Johnson playing a drum made from an elephant foot, floats promoting nearby department store Whiteleys, Agnes O’Connoll’s London Irish Girls Pipers Band and a donkey.

It was the actions of the resident steelpannists at this pageant that transformed a ‘Fayre’ into a carnival. Russell Henderson, Sterling Betancourt and Ralph Cherry were local musicians who played regularly at the Coleherne pub in Earl’s Court, a pioneering establishment that catered to both Black and queer clientele. “We never had stands for our instruments, so we are completely mobile,” Henderson recalled to the writer Lloyd Bradley in an interview before he died in 2015 (and published in Bradley’s Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital). “I’m thinking that, like when we have carnival in Trinidad, we should go on a bit of a road march. I told the organisers, ‘Let’s move the barriers from the street and make a block of it.’ We made it up as we went along – if we saw a bus coming then we’d take another street. The police didn’t know what to do, so they just let us get on with it and I kept telling them, ‘Oh it’s all right, we’re just going to the next corner then we’ll go back.’ It was real exciting and people were swept up with it, so we just kept on going. The West Indians knew what was going on. At first it was just the three of us, but people were joining in with all sort of percussion instruments, even if they were just banging a bottle with a spoon. It was like we were the Pied Pipers.”

The success of this first Fayre led Laslett to continue these annual events, quickly rechristened as a carnival owing to its increasingly Caribbean focus. Since then, many figureheads have developed the carnival into what it is now. There are too many to name here, but a couple worth noting are Leslie Palmer, who organised the so-called ‘Mas in the Ghetto’ in 1973, introducing Jamaican sound systems, and Wilf Walker, who first put on live reggae and punk bands in 1979.

Not for the first time, riots occurred in Notting Hill in 1976 when the carnival developed into bedlam. In Ishmahil Blagrove Jr’s book The Frontline: A Story of Struggle, Resistance and Black Identity in Notting Hill, a steward, Bentley Edwards, remembers the atmosphere: “As the years went by, the carnival just got bigger and better. By 1976 the carnival was really starting to heave. It didn’t have a finish time; it just went on and on. That year there was a wave of criminality that was building up and swept through the Black community. There were a lot of pickpockets, guys who we called ‘sticks-men’. You had a lot of guys come from over South London, and they started to rob white people. People were angry because nothing was happening for them. There were no jobs, no breaks. We would get stopped every week by the police; people were fed up. It was those tensions that blew up at the carnival.” Extraordinarily, following hard work from many involved, the carnival returned the following year and continued through the decades in an unbroken run. That is until the COVID-19 pandemic brought London to a standstill. But after two years off, the carnival, of course, returned, just as bright and brash as before.

It must be said that navigating the carnival isn’t always easy, especially with what is often superficial coverage from the media. You should really start on the Thursday night with the final of the UK Calypso Monarch competition. This takes place in the Tabernacle, a former chapel turned arts centre that hosts the Carnival Village Trust. A modest but dedicated group of British calypsonians bring their topical compositions each year to fight for the coveted crown, won last year by Trinidad-born, England-raised performer Alexander D Great with his COVID-inspired song, ‘Sometimes’.

Saturday evening brings the delightfully named Panorama in Emslie Horniman’s Pleasance park. This is the grand competition between the UK’s steel pan bands. Each troupe has as many as 80 members and is given ten minutes to perform a piece (often an arrangement of a recent soca hit) from memory. It’s slow going, with long gaps between performances, but when that full orchestra comes to life in front of you the complexity and physical intensity of the massed noise is astounding. The likes of Pan Nation Steel Orchestra and Metronomes Steel Orchestra always put on impressive performances, but the real competition is always between the Mangrove Steelband and last year’s winner, the Ebony Steelband.

The carnival proper takes place over the next two days. The committed will be at Ladbroke Grove at 6am on Sunday for J’Ouvert, during which revellers pelt each other with powdered paint (instead of the mud and oils used in the Caribbean).

Sunday is nominally ‘family day’, but to be honest I’ve never noticed much difference between Sunday and Monday. Carnival certainly isn’t for the fainthearted – the music is bone-shakingly loud, the crowds dense and crime far from unknown. A viral video of a machete-wielding youth in the crowd last year certainly put the scarers on some, but given the huge numbers present these things have to be taken in context.

The motorised floats are surprisingly underwhelming as a spectacle, many simply blasting out tunes, but they are interspersed with trucks carrying glorious steel bands, some fresh from Panorama the day before. Behind the vehicles come the paraders from different ‘mas bands’ [short for masquerade]. Always clad in immaculate costumes, they strut their way around the whole three-and-a-half mile route. Costumes in the early days were eclectic and imaginative, often inspired by folklore and history. Today they are typically more conventional but are still stunning works of art, usually focussed on feathers, sequins and bare flesh. Often overlooked is the influence of Brazilian carnival on Notting Hill: the London School of Samba was the first Brazilian-inspired group to play, debuting in 1984, and last year a total of seven sets of sambistas performed.

There are also over 30 sound systems dotted through the neighbourhood bordered by the parade route, their massive speaker stacks proudly bookending a DJ set-up and sometimes even a stage for guest performers. Reggae, ragga, soca, dancehall and anything from Afrobeats and drum’n’bass to American R&B boom out, bouncing off the walls of the prettily painted Notting Hill houses. The two live music stages have no published line-up, so it’s the luck of the draw who you get to see, from visiting roots musicians to mainstream stars (Dizzee Rascal and Shaggy both appeared last year).

For me, it’s often most satisfying to escape the crush and wander a quieter street to see what you find. Most years I have the delight of stumbling upon master drummer Alex Dayo (born in Burkina Faso, based in North London) and his collaborators improvising on a street corner. I love the noise, the bass and the sheer energy of the main streets, but here, a bunch of local musicians sharing their traditions on a street corner with their neighbours? That sums up the spirit of Rhaune Laslett’s carnival for me.

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today