Stop trying to move Notting Hill Carnival to Hyde Park
Carnival belongs in the streets, as it has done not just for decades, but centuries
Above the desk of Matthew Phillip, CEO of the Notting Hill Carnival Trust, hangs a 19th century drawing, titled ‘Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad’ — drawn by visiting British newspaper artist Melton Prior in 1881. The gleeful Black dancers in the centre of the drawing are dressed as devils and harlequins, their legs and arms alive with motion, while a supercilious white Vicar looks on from the side of the road. Trinidad’s plantation-owning European colonial elites had banned Black people from their Mardi Gras balls, banned them from celebrations in the streets, and later in the 19th century, when they formed their own carnival in response, banned them from drumming. The great significance of the drawing, Phillip told me when I interviewed him last year, is that the crowd of Black carnivalgoers is in the middle of the street, at long last — holding a mirror up to their devilish masters, the people who normally ran the roads, and would deny them this essential right, and rite.
There was an opinion piece in The Guardian yesterday by ex-cop and former chair of the Black Police Association Leroy Logan, which (among other things) argued that Notting Hill Carnival should be moved to Hyde Park. Oh boy, HERE WE GO AGAIN. Few revellers and even fewer members of the public will have noticed, but this demand to move NHC to Hyde Park arrives on the day after Carnival every single year. It is, as I wrote on twitter earlier, 1) unworkable, 2) an insult, 3) what Tories and racists say, every year, and 4) completely antithetical to what carnival is: a street party, and a reclamation of that space.
Carnival is not just in the streets, in the same way that a car or a traffic light or an ice cream van might be in the streets. Carnival is the streets — it is inextricable from the place where it exists.
Below — you knew it was coming — is a short extract from my new book MULTITUDES: How Crowds Made the Modern World, which is out 22 October 2024, and available for pre-order now at the link. It features an entire chapter on the history of carnivals as the quintessential example of self-organised grassroots crowd joy, going back to Bakhtin’s work on medieval carnivals, and focusing in on the history of Notting Hill Carnival, its roots in Caribbean resistance to racist far-right street violence (sound familiar?), and what makes it, quite simply, the best weekend of the year for so many people — including for guests; tall white guys with Jewish-Methodist heritage, for example. Looking through the archives when writing Multitudes last summer, I discovered the calls to move Carnival off the streets and into the park go back at least as far as the 1970s. Indeed, these calls directly echo the attempts of British and French colonial forces to tame, contain and control Carnival in the 19th century Caribbean:
The exact location in which a carnival takes place is a subject of great significance and long-standing dispute. Battlefront, the newspaper of the UK’s Black Parents Movement, reflected on this continuity in August 1987: “The [colonial] authorities tried to confine [Trinidad’s] carnival to the savannah (a big open grassy space) and take it off the streets. In the 1970s and early 1980s in London when the Home Secretary and the police tried to get carnival off the streets and into a park such as Hyde Park or Battersea Park, all these memories were revived.”
It is an argument that continues into the present, with regular demands by Notting Hill Carnival’s critics that it be relocated to Hyde Park. These demands are usually framed as a simple, logical solution which ‘still lets everyone have their fun’ — a disingenuous argument which ignores the significance of where the crowd is permitted to assemble. It is intrinsic to Carnival’s raison d'être that it should be in the streets where people live — where, originally, a lot of working-class Caribbean migrants lived, before many were priced out — and does not become another drab corporate festival in a park, brought to you in association with Barclaycard and BAE Systems or similar. The whole point is that the city has been transformed and the streets have been taken over by the crowd, in all its costumed extravagance. The familiar and quotidian has become unrecognisable, like a snow day.
To Matthew Phillip, the Hyde Park proposal is absurd, offensive to the spirit and history of Carnival — and furthermore, it wouldn’t even work. The capacity for live events in the park is 65,000, less than a tenth of the daily carnival crowd. And where there are high fences and a contained space for the crowd, ticketing and reduced accessibility is sure to follow. “Introducing an economic barrier to entry would alter the diversity of the crowd,” Phillip said. “But I think they know that.”
Former Harrow Council leader and 2024 Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall calls for Carnival to be moved to Hyde Park every year, whatever the weather: a dance she performs for the right-wing press, who applaud with gusto. She has called the event “vandalism”, “dangerous,” alleged that it puts residents “through hell” and argued it should be moved to Hyde Park “for the safety of the police, the innocent that attend and the poor residents that live in the area." The cavalier fashion with which she carries out this annual ritual suggests Hall knows it won’t happen, but it provides her and the press with a mutually beneficial piece of dog-whistle racism and culture war agitation every August. Performatively lashing out at Carnival, and by implication at Black culture and its predominantly Black crowd, will always win favour in some quarters.
It was, as always, the best weekend of the year. Here’s one of about four passable photos I took, in the thick of it at the Disya Jeneration sound system. Roll on next year — and see you in the streets of west London.