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Meanwhile, the generation of black and white social workers and activists who flocked to Notting Hill after the riots have largely been left out of the history of the British left. This article treats Notting Hill after 1958 as an important locale of new progressive thinking and action.
- Camilla Schofield, Ben Jones
- 2019
It was this small community children’s street fayre back in the mid 60s that would morph into what we now know as Notting Hill Carnival. Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian human rights activist based in London, put on a BBC broadcasted indoor ‘Caribbean Carnival’ at St Pancras Town Hall back in 1959.
Why was The Mangrove an important space for the black community of Notting Hill?
Notting Hill is a district of West London, England, [1] in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Notting Hill is known for being a cosmopolitan and multicultural neighbourhood, hosting the annual Notting Hill Carnival and the Portobello Road Market. [2] From around 1870, Notting Hill had an association with artists. [3]
- August 1958: Notting Hill Race Riots
- Tensions Rise
- A Promising Start
- The Soundsystems Arrive
- Carnival Booms and Booms
- 1976-79: The Bad Bits
- Mangrove Steel Band Comes to Carnival
- The First Woman Dj Performs at Carnival
- More Than Just A Party
- Mahogany Carnival Arts Arrives
In the 1950s, Notting Hill was home to a large West Indian community following the arrival in London of the ship SS Empire Windrush in 1948. They travelled from the West Indies to the UK to fill post-war labour shortages. But the area was also a stronghold for Oswald Mosley’s far-right Union party, which included a large group of far-right, young w...
In an attempt to soothe ongoing tensions, Trinidadian-born activist Claudia Jones organised a Caribbean Carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in January 1959. The event had many of the elements that NHC has today: masqueraders, a steel band, calypso performers and dancers, plus the iconic Carnival Queen competition.But events in Notting Hill were about ...
Moving from a town hall to the streets, Carnival began to take shape in 1966. Community activists Rhaune Laslett and Andre Shervington organised a street ‘fayre’ for children in Notting Hill in that year and invited well-known Trinidadian musician Russell Henderson, who conducted an impromptu procession through the streets, led by the distinctive b...
Crates of records. Stacks of speakers. Bassy vibrations shaking the pavements. Sounds of reggae, ska, groove, samba, blues, calypso and hip hop are what fuel the energy of Carnival each year. First arriving at NHC in 1973, Carnival’s soundsystems were pioneered by early musicheads Duke Vin, Count Shelly and Count Suckle, whose legacies shape the 38...
The tenth Carnival in 1975 was a watershed for the event: attendance jumped from 100,000 to 250,000, and it featured on Time Out’s cover for the first time of many appearances. As more soundsystems arrived, along with more bands, costumes and thousands more people dancing in the streets, Carnival was crowned London’s biggest street party.
The authorities started to view the growing Carnival with suspicion. The Metropolitan Police arrived in 1976 with a large force of officers, which led to clashes between them and Carnival goers, leaving 60 attendees needing hospital treatment, while 66 people were arrested. In Time Out’s report of the 1979 event, we said that ‘the revellers were al...
As one of the oldest steel bands in the parade, Mangrove Mas Band always impress at the annual UK National Panorama competition, a musical jam taking place every year on Carnival Saturday. The tradition sees the band swell up to 75 members, who give up their summer to rehearse and perform an original ten-minute composition. At Panorama, bands can p...
Linett Kamala, AKA DJ Thunderbird, was the first woman to get behind the decks at NHC, aged just 15. Playing at the Disya Jeneration soundsystem at Powis Gardens, W11 – one of Carnival’s oldest soundsystems that she co-founded alongside Michael ‘Tempz’ and William ‘EQ Profile’ – Kamala had no idea that she was making history while spinning records ...
Carnival continued to be a form of resistance, as more people from outside the Caribbean community joined the event. ‘All oppressed people of the world are warriors,’ Mangrove Steel Band founder Arthur Phillip (Matthew Phillip’s father) told Time Out in 1986. At a time when the area of Notting Hill was experiencing 75 percent unemployment, and the ...
Carnival’s amazing sparkling costumes are what make the weekend so recognisable. Costume-maker Clary Salandy and structural engineer Michael Ramdeen formed Mahogany Carnival Arts, a tow-person costume powerhouse, making some of the tallest (and widest) costumes in the parade. Today, Mahogany employs 30 people who craft 150 intricate, sculptural cos...
Apr 15, 2022 · Over five nights at the end of summer 1958, a decade after the beginning of large-scale migration from the Caribbean to Britain, young white men attacked black residents and attempted to drive them off the streets of West London.
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“community” did in Notting Hill, allowing us consider how the politics of anti-racism relates in complex ways to the reformulation of progressive politics in postwar Britain. It reveals how black activists came to reappropriate the language of “community” to critique the ameliorative, welfarist approach to anti-racism.
