Notting Hill Carnival

Three days on the road

The weekend opens on the Saturday with Panorama, the national steel band competition. Sunday begins at six in the morning with J’ouvert, and the carnival is then opened by local residents and participants. The day belongs to children, who parade in carefully crafted costumes, and to the anarchic “dutty mas”. Monday is the climax, when the adult masquerade bands take to the parade route after months of preparation. From noon until seven in the evening the static sound systems play, a tradition rooted in Jamaican culture and reggae, though today they cover everything from rare groove to house.

Playing mas

The costume bands are called mas bands, short for masquerade. There are up to fifty of them, including children’s, Brazilian and “dutty” bands, and each designs its costumes around a new theme every year. The costumes are made in a mas camp, which doubles as a community space, and some 15,000 of them — using thousands of feathers and jewels, wire, fibreglass rods, foam and fabric — are produced between June and August. Anyone can buy a costume and join a band, and judges assess the bands at a judging point on Great Western Road.

From St Pancras to the street

In 1958 Notting Hill was hit by race riots. In January 1959 the Trinidadian journalist and activist Claudia Jones, often called the mother of the carnival, organised a “Caribbean Carnival” indoors at St Pancras Town Hall. In west London, Rhaune Laslett invited Russell Henderson’s steel band to play at her children’s street party; with the pans hung round their necks the band began to walk, and people followed them into the streets. In 1966 she organised the Notting Hill Fayre and Pageant, the first outdoor carnival in Notting Hill. The event grew in the 1970s, when costume bands and steel bands from different islands and the first sound systems joined in, and the carnival marked its sixtieth anniversary in 2026.