Drummers pound their way down the parade route at last year’s carnival. (Michael Abrams/Stars and Stripes)
Most carnival celebrations take place in the winter, but there is one — and it is one of Europe’s biggest — that happens in the middle of summer. And in, of all places, England.
The Notting Hill Carnival started in the mid-1960s as a local festival for the area’s West Indian community, with reportedly about 400 people drawn into the street to listen to groups of steel drum musicians during the first celebration. At the time, Nottting Hill was not the genteel neighborhood of the Julia Roberts-Hugh Grant movie, but rather a rundown quarter, home to many Afro-Caribbean immigrants.
Today, while the look and makeup of the community has changed, for two days a year it is again a place to enjoy and celebrate the same things that the first carnival did. And it has gotten much bigger. The current version draws about 2 million participants and spectators for the August Bank Holiday weekend, Aug. 29-30 this year.
The events center on a joyous parade, nonstop music, street dancing, food and infectious fun. Monday is the big parade with festivities starting in the morning and lasting through the evening — although you really don’t have to get there until early to mid-afternoon. Sunday is Children’s Day, with a shorter parade route and fewer crowds. A steel drum competition on Saturday usually serves as a prelude to the official events.
Musicians, elaborate floats and masquerading denizens parade through the streets to the rhythm of steel bands, samba and calypso music, while DJs blast out reggae, hip-hop and drum ’n’ bass from stationary sound systems set up along the carnival route and local bands perform on stages. Spectators line the parade route or fill the areas around the sound systems.
Mingling with the sounds of the Caribbean are the aromas of its food. Jerk chicken, rice and peas, various curries and fried plantains are some of the food sold by vendors along the parade route, washed down with Jamaican Red Stripe beer or stronger Caribbean cocktails (think rum).
The parades have their roots in Caribbean masquerades, started, according to the carnival’s website, by freed slaves who did not want to be identified. The costumes in current parades are often flamboyant, always colorful and usually quite skimpy. Indeed, a visitor to the carnival shouldn’t be shocked to see a little near-nakedness now and then.
But the main point of the Notting Hill Carnival is to party, party, party and dance, dance, dance. And if the beats from the sound systems don’t get you going, the rhythms of the Caribbean will.