Up to two million revellers attended the Notting Hill Carnival, a celebration of Caribbean culture. It might not be a complete exaggeration to say that I may have brushed against half of them, as I joined the fun-loving, raucous flow of humanity that shambled through the streets of the West London enclave during England’s sun-soaked long weekend.
There was the woman I literally bumped into near Ladbroke Grove who was dressed in full carnival gear. Above the waist she wore only a bra whose cups were – also literally – drinking cups shaped in a peculiar fashion. Each was clear plastic and contained some sort of cocktail, with a straw sticking through a hole in the top.
It was unlikely she could lean forwards far enough to drink from the straws herself, unless she had a double-jointed neck. Yet the cups were half empty by the time the woman stumbled into me. We clapped eyes for barely an instant and laughed as we passed each other, strangers and also co-conspirators in the levity of a moment.
There was also DJ Gladdy Wax, a veteran Jamaican vinyl spinner who set up shop on Sunday afternoon outside a pet shop near Portobello Road. He drew a large, bouncing, appreciative crowd whose perma-grins were no doubt helped along by the pungent, exotic smoke that curled into the air from almost everywhere around us.
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The flats above the pet shop were scruffy. An even scruffier man leaned out of one of the windows, waving like a monarch from a palace balcony as he surveyed the scene below. His face carried the gaunt shape of someone who had endured struggles. Yet he looked serene on Sunday, swaying at his open window to a rhythm set by Gladdy Wax.
That was the vibe I mostly encountered during the daytime at the carnival parade and on its sidelines down umpteen streets: impish, joyful, exuberant, occasionally outrageous. It came from curried goat sellers, steel bands and dancers, hangers-on and chancers.
The Notting Hill Carnival clearly has its detractors in certain sections of British media and politics
Things were a little edgier once darkness fell. The police who had been in the background during the day suddenly were more assertive, clutching riot helmets. I saw a few arrests, a couple of broken noses and some peacocking by the Westway flyover.
I witnessed an angry policeman berate a young man in a Tupac T-shirt for harassing women: “Those four girls have told you to f**k off and you keep going up to them.” Tupac man’s friends pulled him away before he could talk himself into even more trouble.
But that was about the extent of the antisocial behaviour that I witnessed. Given there was probably close to a million people on the streets on either day, it seemed like a small amount of trouble – barely 150 arrests on Sunday alone. There was nothing like the two fatal attacks – one stabbing and one beating – that marred last year’s carnival.
Fears of more violence had also scared away sponsors from this year’s event. There were also renewed calls from a cohort of right-leaning politicians to end the carnival as it is known and move it instead to a more secure but sterile location such as Hyde Park. Leaders from the West Indian and African communities say this would kill the event.
Matt Twist, the London Metropolitan Police’s head of frontline policing, was scathing of the carnival when he appeared before a committee of the London Assembly last September. He said it had become associated with “significant violence”, yet his biggest fear was a “mass casualty event” such as a crush or stampede.
His intervention piled pressure on the organisers, who ordered a review of safety. As recently as eight weeks ago they were still £1 million (€1.16 million) short of the cost of implementing the review’s recommendations, risking the staging of the entire event.
Britain’s Labour government rebuffed pleas for cultural funding and so it fell to the London Authority, Westminster, and Kensington & Chelsea councils to stump up the extra cash. Organisers say it needs stable long-term funding or it will be under threat.
The new security procedures along with extra measures implemented by police, including metal detectors to find knives and facial-recognition technology to weed out known troublemakers, appear to have put the carnival on a calmer trajectory this year.
The Notting Hill Carnival clearly has its detractors in certain sections of British media and politics. Yet elected leaders are also wary of being seen to take anything else away from a community that in recent years has lost so much more.
Visible from some of the carnival’s biggest thoroughfares, the cladded bulk of Grenfell Tower loomed over the event. Its scorched shell, where 72 people perished, was a reminder to all that tragedy can spring from nowhere.
All the more reason to embrace joy when the opportunity arises.
