This isn’t going to be a piece celebrating the rich cultural tapestry of London’s Afro-Caribbean community, sombrely expressing the importance of preserving its heritage and history. I just like going to Carnival. I see it as an opportunity to make the most of the last dregs of the summer. I’ll meet my friends, dance to a grizzled Rasta’s tunes with a Magnum or two (a syrupy, 16.5 per cent alcohol, Jamaican tonic wine), watch the steel drums and befeathered dancers, before decamping with a box of jerk chicken and fried plantain.
There’s no £499 VIP Platinum wristband you can buy to have the premium Carnie experience
I spent the first decade or so of my life in London, and returning here as an adult is a disillusioning experience. A bit like the disappointment of trying a favourite childhood snack years later, you start to wonder whether it’s the recipe that’s changed or you. Almost every spot I remember has been ripped up and replaced with some soulless global franchise – the only ones to afford the rent and wages. The Trocadero arcade whose escalators I remember scrambling up and down? Now a capsule hotel and mosque. Even the heart of London’s nightlife, Soho, is hampered by regulations closing busy spots by midnight, forcing people into clubs with obscene entry prices.
Notting Hill Carnival is thus one of the few opportunities in London that isn’t pay-to-play. There’s no £499 VIP Platinum wristband you can buy to have the premium Carnie experience. If you want to hear legendary selector Gladdy Wax and his unmatched reggae collection (it helps that he owned his own record shop), you’ll have to get yourself through the throng halfway up Portobello Road. Inevitably you’ll be waylaid by someone playing dancehall icon Buju Banton, or your friends will inexplicably split off when they hear a Chris Brown song off Colville Terrace (good luck finding them again). No matter where you end up, you’re within minutes of a genre legend and a crowd that has been lured in with a couple of deep cuts and some well-timed classics.
As trite as it sounds, it’s a rare moment where – if only briefly – you feel like you’re back in old, unpolished London, where hospitality isn’t dictated by your bank balance, and where you don’t have to book three years in advance. I speak to one woman with a leg tattoo of the Kray twins – a local, she’s brought her kids for the umpteenth year – and chat to a Bangladeshi copper who says if she weren’t working the festival she’d probably be partying herself. The festival itself counterintuitively also feels apolitical, leaving no one feeling unwelcome. There’s no chanting of slogans, and while there are plenty of flags, it’s Grenada or St Lucia rather than Israel or Palestine. Patriotism, after all, abhors a vacuum.
When it comes to violence, sure, the festival undeniably pulls above its weight for an average day in Notting Hill. Yet much like cities tidying up for the Olympics, just because you habitually secrete something away and forget about it, it doesn’t mean it conveniently stops existing. A black teenager bleeding out on the street is no less tragic when it’s on a fringe London estate than when it’s outside a row of pastel-coloured houses.
Those clamouring for Carnival’s demise see it as just another skirmish in the culture wars. Booing from their armchairs, they derive their politics from a state of opposition. But if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
There’s a degree of bitterness in the matter – understandable to some degree – ‘Why are they apportioned an annual patriotic parade, but I’m the villain for wanting the same?’ Yet celebration isn’t a zero sum game, and Carnival isn’t the enemy. It’s one of the few remnants of a bygone London, and we’d be sorry to see it gone.
Comments