Carnival at 60: Why they'll never kill the spirit of Notting Hill

It began as a small celebration of Caribbean culture — now the unity of old and new generations is pushing London’s biggest party ever forward

On an unsuspecting W10 backstreet, the party’s come early. Residents gawp from windows and balconies at a mini-parade of feather-clad bikini dancers and plumage-framed muscle men. Atop a food truck dispensing trays of sticky BBQ wings a sound system rattles windows with hip-shaking Caribbean soca sounds while, at the far end of the street, a drum troupe provides the beat for a trio of skipping stilt-walkers dressed as sentient totem poles.

This may only be a tiny taste of the full-blown event, laid on for a launch party in July, but Notting Hill Carnival 2026 is clearly itching to whack on its peacock headdress and spark up its 60th anniversary extravaganza.

“It’s exciting, the anticipation now, waiting for August to come,” says Gladwin Wright, mainstay of Carnival’s ska and reggae Gladdy Wax sound system since the late-1980s, speaking at the two-hour teaser event. “You get people spending their holiday in London at this time, from abroad. When I turn up [at Carnival] on Sunday morning, people make jokes, they say, ‘Gladdy, where you been, man? We’ve been waiting since last year!’.”

As some of its most prominent and pioneering figures gather in local community hub The Tabernacle to reflect on Carnival’s history and significance, there’s a real sense of pride in having seen it thrive and survive for six decades. This is, after all, a weekend of sheer joy born in defiance of hatred. In 1959, following race riots and tensions between local fascist strongholds and Windrush generation settlers in Notting Hill, which led to the murder of 31-year-old Antiguan Kelso Cochrane, journalist and activist Claudia Jones — dubbed the mother of Carnival — organised a steel band and calypso Mardi Gras to counteract disintegrating race relations in the UK.

That first event took place a few miles away at St Pancras Town Hall. Seven years later, the first parade around Notting Hill, itself in 1966, was a more spontaneous affair. Wanting to put on a carnival for the end of the school holidays, and to promote cultural unity in a divided area, activist Rhaune Laslett organised the Notting Hill Fayre and Pageant, featuring processions of children in Charles Dickens characters and bands of Irish pipers, New Orleans brass and Trinidadian steel drums.

In 1973, new director Leslie “Teacher” Palmer obtained permission to introduce static sound systems around Ladbroke Grove, where floats of costume and steel bands from the Caribbean paraded for the first time, merging reggae, calypso and masquerade in a rush of sound and colour. But even by the time Williams and her husband Vernon launched their own mas band Genesis in 1980, bedecked in annual themed costumes depicting ancient Egypt, Africa or the Far East, the event was still somewhat wild at heart. “There was no route, there was no structure,” Williams remembers. “The bands just went everywhere, anywhere they wanted, and policemen would move the crowd aside.