The Notting Hill Carnival is an annual Caribbean Carnival event that has taken place in London, UK since 1966"About us", Notting Hill Carnival '13, London Notting Hill Enterprises Trust. . on the streets of the Notting Hill area of Kensington, over the August Bank Holiday weekend.BBC – 1Xtra – Black History: "What happened in 1965". Retrieved 17 March 2012.
It is led by members of the British Caribbean community, and attracts around two million people annually, making it one of the world's largest street festivals, the largest in Europe, and a significant event in British African Caribbean and British Indo-Caribbean culture.Dabydeen, Professor David (August 2010), "Notting Hill Carnival", Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick. Retrieved 30 August 2015. In 2006, the UK public voted the Notting Hill Carnival onto a list of icons of England.
Carnival traditionally commences on the Saturday with Panorama, a competition between steelpan bands. Sunday is designated family and children's day, with a shorter parade route for young people. The main adult parade takes place on Monday. Notting Hill Carnival represents the "five disciplines of carnival": masquerade, calypso, soca, steelpan, and sound systems.
History The origin of Notting Hill Carnival can be traced to a number of roots.Jamie [Clifton] (21 August 2014), "Things You Never Knew About Carnival", Vice.
A "Caribbean Carnival" was held on 30 January 1959 in St Pancras Town Hall as a response to the problematic state of race relations at the time; the UK's first widespread racial attacks, the Notting Hill race riots in which 108 people were charged, had occurred the previous year. This was organised by the Trinidadian journalist and activist Claudia Jones, often described as "the mother of the Notting Hill Carnival" in her capacity as editor of the newspaper The West Indian Gazette, and directed by Edric Connor. It showcased elements of a Caribbean carnival in a cabaret style. It featured the Mighty Terror singing the calypso "Carnival at St Pancras", The Southlanders, Cleo Laine, the Trinidad All Stars and Hi–fi steel bands dance troupe, finishing with a Caribbean Carnival Queen beauty contest and a Grand Finale Jump-Up by West Indians who attended the event.
The first outside event in Notting Hill was in August 1966, a hippie London Free School-inspired festival organised by Rhaune Laslett,Davina Hamilton, "'Yes, This Is Notting Hill Carnival's 50th Year'" ("Debora Alleyne De Gazon, creative director of the London Notting Hill Carnival Enterprises Trust, clears up the confusion about the year the event began"), The Voice, 28 August 2016. who was not aware of the indoor events when she first raised the idea. This festival was a more diverse Notting Hill event to promote cultural unity. A street party for neighbourhood children turned into a carnival procession when Russell Henderson's steel band (who had played at the earlier Claudia Jones events) went on a walkabout. By 1970 "the Notting Hill Carnival consisted of 2 music bands, the Russell Henderson Combo and Selwyn Baptiste's Notting Hill Adventure Playground Steelband and 500 dancing spectators."La Rose, Michael (July 2004), . Submitted to Joseph Charles Media, publishers of Soca News, for August 2004 Notting Hill Carnival edition of Carnival Groove.
Leslie "Teacher" Palmer, who was director from 1973 to 1975, is credited with "getting sponsorship, recruiting more steel bands, reggae groups and sound systems, introducing generators and extending the route."Peter Timothy, "Visionaries, Pioneers, Apostles and Healers: The Contribution of Migrants from Trinidad and Tobago to the Development of Black Britain, 1948 to 1986". European Conference on Arts & Humanities, 2013, Proceedings, p. 5. Quoting Tom Vague, 50 Years of Carnival 1959–2009, London: HISTORY talk, 2009, p. 22.Portobello Film Festival. He encouraged traditional masquerade, and for the first time in 1973 costume bands and steel bands from the various islands took part in the street parade,Ofosu, Natasha (17 August 2012), "Notting Hill Carnival pioneers to be honoured", Soca News. . alongside the introduction of stationary sound systems, as distinct from those on moving floats, which, as Alex Pascall has explained, "created the bridge between the two cultures of carnival, reggae and calypso."Carnival (2014), p. 290. "Notting Hill Carnival became a major festival in 1975 when it was organised by a young teacher, Leslie Palmer." The carnival was also popularised by live radio broadcasts by Pascall on his daily Black Londoners programme for BBC Radio London.
Sam King is described in tributes as a co-founder and early organiser of the Notting Hill Carnival, having helped establish a Caribbean street festival in 1964 that later developed into the modern carnival. In addition to his role in the carnival’s early years, King was a prominent community activist of the Windrush generation and later became the first Black mayor of Southwark.
Russell Henderson, was a piano and steelpan jazz musician, whose steelband played at the "Caribbean Carnival" organised at St Pancras Town Hall.Blagrove, Ishmahil (2014) "Introduction", in Ishmahil Blagrove and Margaret Busby (eds), Carnival: A Photographic and Testimonial History of the Notting Hill Carnival, Rice N Peas Books, London,(), p. 12. He is widely recognised as one of the founding figures of the Carnival. With Henderson was also Sterling Betancourt, steelpan arranger and musician.
Duke Vin (Vincent George Forbes) is credited as having brought the first sound system to the United Kingdom in 1955 when he was a stowaway on a ship from Jamaica to the United Kingdom, and what is thought to be the first sound system to the Notting Hill Carnival in 1973, which paved the way for the many sound systems that operate at the carnival today. Duke Vin became a legend in Ladbroke Grove and had a huge influence on the popularisation of reggae and ska in Britain. He played at Notting Hill Carnival with his sound system, "Duke Vin the Tickler's", every year until his death in 2012.
Emslie Horniman's Pleasance (in the Kensal Green district of the area), has been the carnival's traditional starting point. Among the early bands to participate were Ebony Steelband and Metronomes Steelband."How Carnival was developed in Britain?", Carnival in Education. . As the carnival had no permanent staff or head office, the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill, run by another Trinidadian, Frank Crichlow, came to function as an informal communication hub and office address for the carnival's organisers.
The 1976 carnival was marred by riots. There was considerable press coverage of the disorder, which some felt took an unfairly negative and one-sided view of the carnival. There were calls from politicians and the press for the event to be banned or relocated. Prince Charles was one of the few establishment figures who supported the event. Leila Hassan campaigned for Arts Council England to recognise the Notting Hill Carnival as an art form.
Since 1978 the national Panorama competition is held on the Saturday preceding the carnival.
Concerns about the size of the event led to London mayor Ken Livingstone setting up a Carnival Review Group in 2000 to look into "formulating guidelines to safeguard the future of the Carnival". An interim report by the review led to a change to the route in 2002. When the full report was published in 2004, it recommended that Hyde Park be used as a "savannah" (an open space to draw crowds away from residential areas), though the proposal of such a move attracted concerns, including that the Hyde Park event might overshadow the original street carnival.
In 2003 the Notting Hill Carnival was run by a limited company, the Notting Hill Carnival Trust Ltd. A report by the London Development Agency on the 2002 Carnival estimated that the event contributed around £93 million to the London and UK economy.
The Mayor of London's Carnival Review Group's report, published in 2004, led to the parades taking a circular rather than linear route, but a recommendation to relocate the event in Hyde Park was resisted.
In 2015 there was controversy when the Carnival Trust charged journalists £100 to cover the event, and demanded copies of all work produced relating to the event within three weeks of the end of the Carnival. The National Union of Journalists organised a boycott of the event. In 2016 the charge remained, but in June 2017 the Carnival's new event management team introduced a revised media policy, with no requirement for accreditation fees."New Media Policy and Official Media Centre at Carnival", Press release, Notting Hill Carnival Guide, 16 June 2017. .
On both days at the 2017 carnival, a minute's silence was observed in tribute to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, with many carnival-goers wearing "green for Grenfell"."Notting Hill Carnival: Thousands enjoy sound, samba and sun", BBC News, 29 August 2017.
The 2020 carnival was cancelled due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, although free live-streamed events were shown online across four channels; the 2021 Carnival was also cancelled.
Carnival resumed in 2022, starting with a run, and with a 72-second silence to remember the 72 victims of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.
In March 2026, the Mayor of London announced £5 million in funding for the 2026 carnival, with a focus on managing overcrowding.
The 2026 carnival celebrated its 60th anniversary.
Culture of the carnival This huge street festival attracting about two million people every year to Notting Hill and highlights Caribbean and Black diasporic cultures. Carnival uses influences from many other festivals around the world. Authors Julian Henriques and Beatrice Ferrara claim the festival draws mainly on the Trinidad Carnival as well as Crop Over, Canadian Caribana in Toronto and the US Labor Day Festival in Brooklyn. They also explain that Notting Hill Carnival is dually influenced by its diasporic cultures and its own country's influences. Henriques and Ferrara claim: "Carnival also has an explosive auditory impact due to its cacophony of sounds, in which soca, steel bands, calypso floats and sound systems mix and mingle in a multi-media and multi-sensory event" (Ferrara 132).
This mixture of percussion, with emphasis on the beat and rhythm, leads to the extreme dancing in the streets for which Carnival is known, with citizens participating to the beat of the music, using mud and paint, dancing with the lower parts of the body. Henriques and Ferrara explain that people emphasise the "baseness" of the music, with everything being about the "bottom": the ground, the bottom of the body, and the bottom of the beat. The festival uses influences from the Jamaican dancehalls and British clubs, and the music is made loud enough for participants to feel the beat. The vibrations from the speakers allow people to better connect with the ground and bring their experience to another level.
The authors of the same article further explain how Notting Hill Carnival also creates "territory". The parade route portion of the Carnival is where carnival floats play both recorded and live music and circulate the street, visualizing the boundaries of Carnival and marking its territory. The circulating movement of the Carnival parade is also an extending of space through sound. Territorializing the space through sounds of African beats, such as the pan, fosters a sense of identity and unity for the overall Carnival.