Notting Hill — Carnival origins
The streets around Powis Square and All Saints Road, where the Notting Hill Carnival took its first outdoor shape in 1966 under the leadership of Rhaune Laslett. The Notting Hill Carnival’s lineage is double: indoors, the 1959 ‘Caribbean Carnival’ organised by Claudia Jones at St Pancras Town Hall after the racist murder of Kelso Cochrane; outdoors, a small London Free School pageant in 1966 led by community organiser Rhaune Laslett, which drew steel-pan musicians from the Trinidadian community led by Russell Henderson.
From those two strands came what is now Europe’s largest street festival, anchored to the August bank holiday, and a century-defining act of Caribbean Britishness.
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Sources
- Cohen, Abner. Masquerade Politics: Explorations in the Structure of Urban Cultural Movements. University of California Press, 1993.