Following the fire at the west London tower block, there were new calls for the Notting Hill carnival to be relocated. But counting down to this year’s event, locals and carnival makers remain adamant that it should stay put – and pay respect to the victims

On 6 July, three weeks after a still-unknown number of people died in the Grenfell Tower fire, Greg Hands MP, minister for London, wrote an open letter to London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, to ask whether it was “appropriate” to hold Notting Hill carnival in the “proximity of a major national disaster”. Khan moved swiftly to dismiss Hands’s intervention, replying that any attempt to move the carnival would be a mistake “at a time when the community has little trust in those in positions of authority… It is only right that this year’s carnival marks the terrible tragedy at Grenfell Tower and the mayor will work closely with the organisers and the wider community to ensure they are consulted and involved in the planning for an appropriate commemoration.”

People see ghosts, hear the screams at night… All of us here that morning saw what was happening behind those windows

“We need carnival more than ever now,” agrees Emma Dent Coad, the new Labour MP for Kensington (full disclosure: I canvassed for her during the general election). She won her seat by just 20 votes in June from Conservative Victoria Borwick and lives close to Grenfell. The fire happened four days after the third recount confirmed her election and she’s been working closely with the traumatised community ever since. “My predecessor, Victoria Borwick, was very keen on moving it too. And Greg Hands is in the next office to mine! He could have asked me. He was grandstanding with no plan whatsoever. It’s disgraceful really.”

Carnival can only happen every year with the help of tens of thousands of volunteer participants, overseen by the London Notting Hill Carnival Enterprises Trust (LNHCET). The trust is funded by Kensington and Chelsea council (most of the carnival area is in the borough; about 15% to the east and north is in neighbouring Westminster) and represents the various artistic arenas of carnival: masquerade or mas (costume), pan (steel band), calypso, soca, and static and mobile sound systems.

“One of the Grenfell survivors wrote a letter to the trust, imploring us to keep going,” says trustee Kemi Sobers, controller of the carnival’s world music stage. “They’d lost four of the five members of their family. One of our calypsonians [calypso musicians] lives right opposite; there are members with people still missing; a friend of my father’s is still missing. It’s just tough; we feel it deeply.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lionel McCalman rehearses with members of the Nostalgia Steel band. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

Augustin “Pepe” Francis chairs the carnival trust. He’s also president of the British Association of Steel Bands and director of Ebony, one of the UK’s leading steel bands. One of the carnival’s elders, Pepe moved to London from Trinidad in 1961 aged 18 and hasn’t missed a Notting Hill carnival in more than 40 years. “The council this year cut our [annual] grant from £100,000 to £52,000,” says Pepe. “We have to manage everything we do with that money.”

Today’s carnival evolved from the week-long Notting Hill festival, first held in August 1966. The festival showcased African, Asian, Caribbean and European culture, to improve community relations at a time when Notting Hill was a slum riven by racism. The first festival was a tiny event attended by a few hundred, but it was Trinidadian Russell Henderson’s pioneering steel band that later brought people out on to the streets in their thousands.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour MP Emma Dent Coad, who took the Kensington seat from the incumbent Conservative candidate in June’s general election. Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

In the 70s, the carnival became an ever-expanding, all-islands Caribbean event, based around the core Trinidadian arts of mas and pan. For the first half of its life, carnival sprawled all over the Notting Hill area; there was no defined route. Sound systems appeared wherever there was a power source and the welded-together, hand-drawn mas and steel band floats went where they liked. These days, carnival puts 12 steel bands, 38 static sound systems and 60 mas bands on the road. The steel and mas bands are accompanied by floats that are actually mammoth, 40ft articulated lorries or double-decker buses and which spend several hours completing the 2.5-mile route around the carnival’s border. No one really knows exactly how many people attend, but it’s around a million a day, making it second only to the Rio carnival in size.

Even on this scale, the carnival’s heart is its community. “Grenfell is carnival,” says Ricky Belgrave, chair of Bass (the British Association of Sound Systems, the organisation that oversees the carnival’s static systems). “Until four years ago our carnival office was right under Grenfell. We want to put on a fantastic event this year in tribute.” For veterans such as Belgrave, the carnival represents inclusivity and collaboration. There is no entrance fee. Anyone can get “on the road” and the message is “participate, don’t just spectate”.

Belgrave points out that similar concerns to Greg Hands’s were raised before 2011’s carnival, which took place in the aftermath of the riots sparked by the killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham. Despite the expanded police presence, the atmosphere was fantastic and the event peaceful. (A vivid contrast to a much earlier carnival, in 1976, when vastly increased police numbers were seen as provocative by those attending and led to race-fuelled violent clashes between officers and youths, which established the media narrative of criminal carnival that has continued ever since.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A crowded street at Notting Hill carnival, 1976. Photograph: UIG via Getty Images

To some locals, Grenfell is what happens when a community is considered worthless and undesirable – and the carnival is just another battleground in a long campaign of social cleansing. “Outsiders are always saying they want to move carnival,” says Yvette Williams, leader of community campaigners Justice4Grenfell. “Because they don’t understand where it comes from and why it’s there. We didn’t just get together on 14 June [when the fire happened] because the local authority didn’t turn up. We’re a unique community in Notting Hill, we’ve always been like this. All communities used to be like this.”

Four weeks to go



It’s a warm July afternoon when I visit Gloria Cummins’s sprawling studio just off the carnival route. This is a busy month for carnival people, who often work 80-100 hour weeks at this time of year, fitting their unpaid preparation work in around their jobs. Cummins, now retired, founded her traditional Trinidadian mas band, Flamboyan, 31 years ago.

Flamboyan are one of the few bands lucky enough to own their premises, rather than having to rent or borrow space. Four floors of rooms are stuffed with extravagant pieces from previous carnivals – hand-drawn designs, mannequin heads, sketches and scrawled lists, crowns, hats, ribbons, constellations of sequins and endless tubs crammed with baubles in every colour imaginable. At the calm centre of this tornado of colours and textures perches Cummins, tiny, still sharp at 78, warm and friendly, with a firm voice and a gentle cackle whenever something tickles her, which is often. It’s summer but this is England, and she’s from Trinidad, so the heating’s on. Today, she’s tired. “Big C,” she says by way of apology and points to her chest.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gloria Cummins, founder of the Flamboyan mas band. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

Normally Flamboyan would have about 80 masqueraders on the road; this year, they expect at best 30 or 40 by carnival Sunday (which has traditionally been children’s day). Right now, only 25 have signed up, which is worse than it’s ever been. It’s not just Flamboyan – several mas bands this year are struggling with money. Cummins thinks that some parents are being put off by fears of terror threats and acid attacks, or are struggling with cash, so they can’t pay for their children’s costumes. Nor has Cummins been able to pay for her carnival bus yet. Just to get on the road for one day at carnival costs Flamboyan about £5,000, with the sound system, membership fees, security, power generators, insurance and more to account for. Some bands get Arts Council funding, but many don’t have the time or the patience to apply.

“I feel carnival should be completely funded by the Arts Council,” says one senior carnival organiser. “The event is unique, it’s a cultural event where everyone is welcome. It’s valuable for us and our community and our country but the borough offers the barest minimum in operational funding and the trust gets no funding from the Arts Council.”

Some grouse about the £297,298 granted earlier this year to online broadcaster Boiler Room by the Arts Council. Boiler Room streamed DJs’ sets from a number of sound systems at the carnival for the first time last summer and is expanding its operations in 2017. I check with Arts Council England and its response is swift. Boiler Room’s money comes from a one-off grant to be spent on a campaign against negative media perceptions of the carnival as well as sustainability – working with sound systems to help them get funding of their own from sponsors and public bodies. The carnival trust could have applied to become a part of the Arts Council’s 2018-22 portfolio – that is the £1.6bn funding programme of 831 organisations that will include a grant of £96m over four years to the Royal Opera House – but the Arts Council didn’t receive an application.

The disaster has galvanised the community in a very positive way Lionel McCalman

I go to the carnival’s launch with Dent Coad. It’s being held in a bay at Acklam Village, a space behind the Portobello Road street food market, under the Westway. The day before, Dent Coad was at a vigil with Jeremy Corbyn in the survivors’ healing space next door when it emerged that corporate manslaughter charges were being considered in relation to the fire. “There was sheer relief,” she says. “I know people want someone to go to jail for Grenfell. People make decisions and they are accountable for them. Someone signed this off.”

She’s been discussing the carnival with the police and the mayor. “Criminals go to carnival; carnival doesn’t create criminals,” says Dent Coad. “We need more dancing policemen, which is what we had after the riots in 2011. Tell [the police] to keep it chilled, hide the armed police, have more stewards and cover up the tower.”

“People can see ghosts, they hear the screams at night,” Dent Coad continues. “They are freaked out by it. Part of the beginning of the healing will be hiding that thing away. All of us here who saw it that morning saw what was happening behind those windows.”

At the launch, calypsonian David “Alexander D Great” Loewenthal sings a lovely song about the sorrow, regret and anger post-Grenfell and rapper Empress 1 delivers her punishing, powerful contribution to the new Poetry for Grenfell project:

This ain’t a time to divide

time to unite to survive

drop the ego that you’re feeding

do what’s right by these lost lives

Pepe, who has met the Grenfell survivors’ group every week since the fire, gives a short, impressive speech, revealing that his plan for a minute’s silence at the carnival will definitely happen, hopefully on Monday 28 August at 3pm. He finishes by acknowledging the victims of the tragedy who contributed to the event over the years and declares that it won’t be going anywhere; then his Ebony band play an energetic, gloriously noisy set, including a euphoric pan version of Despacito.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘This is a war zone’: Niles ‘Asheber’ Hailstones at Acklam Village near Portobello Road, where he helps survivors of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

I return to Acklam Village to visit the healing space. It was set up by Niles “Asheber” Hailstones, an articulate 52-year-old musician and activist from Westbourne Park, a short walk from here. Hailstones is a well-known face in the area and has chaired the Westway 23 community group for the past two years. The group wants to protect the 23 acres of land below the Westway for communal use, rather than see it become yet another sterile retail park, as planned by the managing organisation Westway Trust. He set the healing centre up in a fury when he saw one agency removing donations from a street near Grenfell to store them two miles away. “Why move it when I can see the tower from here?” he asks. “When it’s gone, you know it’s not coming back.”

“This is a war zone,” he declares calmly. He explains in a dizzying few minutes how various vested interests would like to “corporatise” the community as well as gentrify it, discusses social cleansing and how Grenfell is a physical manifestation of the war between the rich and the poor. If so, this beautifully improvised space is its field hospital, and will hopefully continue doing good work with survivors here until September thanks to negotiations with the Westway Trust. Providing yoga, chanting, massage, mindfulness, creative writing, or just space for a chat, like the carnival, it’s balm for the community, applied by unpaid volunteers.

Three weeks to go



I walk to the heart of carnival – the Tabernacle, a former church in Powis Square – to talk to Matthew Phillip, 45-year-old leader of the Mangrove steel and mas bands. The bands’ name dates back to the late 60s when Frank Crichlow established the Mangrove restaurant in nearby All Saints Road. It became famous following the Mangrove Nine trial in 1970, when Crichlow and eight fellow activists were cleared of incitement to riot. The judge ruled that there was evidence of racial hatred “on both sides”, which was Britain’s first legal acknowledgement of police racism.

In the 70s, the Mangrove became a haven for London’s black community, opening several other venues such as the Mangrove old people’s home and an advice clinic dealing with housing and addiction. The carnival bands are the last surviving parts of the Mangrove empire. Phillip tells me stories of how councillors were locked in a hall until they agreed the covenant that ensures the venue must always be at the community’s service; how a family picnic convinced a goat-grazing south Londoner to turn Powis Square over to public use. “The community has a rich history of activism,” Phillip says. “And in the wake of Grenfell, you can see it again.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘This community has a rich history of activism’: Matthew Phillip, director of the Tabernacle, home of the Mangrove steel and mas bands. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

The walls inside the Tabernacle, now an arts venue, tell the history of the Notting Hill event and carnival art surrounds us. The steel band rehearses here and it’s also where the mas band makes and displays its costumes. Phillip first came here as an eight-year-old – he’s proud of the framed picture he’s hung in the office of him playing pan at his first carnival – and he has worked at the Tabernacle for most of the past 25 years, taking up the directorship here in 2013. By now, early August, he’s here more hours than he isn’t.

He’s not always happy, though. “There was a press launch last Friday and I run a steel band and a mas band and I didn’t get an invite,” he says. “I’ve seen footage and I just think, here we are with one of the biggest events in the world and that’s the best we can do? It’s embarrassing.

“The golden age was when Claire Holder ran it, 15-20 years ago, and we’ve gone backwards completely since then. The fact is, the management is absent. There’s no communication. The people running carnival all have bands, so where are they during carnival? With their bands. We’ve laid out a lot of money, done months and months of work; it’s the first week of August and we still don’t have official confirmation of our passes! I’m being told it’s all fine, but it’s all verbal and I know in carnival that means nothing. And unless you have your passes you’re not able to get on to the route.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Augustin ‘Pepe’ Francis, chair of the carnival trust and director of the steel band Ebony. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

Two weeks to go



I speak to Dent Coad again, who tells me that the carnival trust has just invited her to give a short speech at the official carnival opening on Sunday morning. “Being an MP is a job,” she says. “Opening carnival is a massive honour. I cried when they asked.” Before that 9am opening there will be the children’s “jouvert” celebrations, a traditional Caribbean opening ceremony that celebrates the break of day by covering everything and everyone in sight with chocolate. Sadly, Dent Coad tells me, the covering of Grenfell Tower is now unlikely to happen before carnival weekend.

I decide to trace the carnival route on foot. I walk from the Regent’s canal at Westbourne Park, through the imposing Brunel estate to the smart, white Victorian townhouses of Westbourne Grove and its luxurious delis and salons, to the haphazard hustle of Portobello Road, the cinematic sweep of Kensington Park Road and down the long final stretch of Ladbroke Grove back to the canal. I double back and head in the direction of the tower. It can’t be seen, but it is everywhere. So many shops and houses I pass have little notices advertising survivor donation appeals. Opposite Ladbroke Grove station is a wall of Grenfell notices – endless taped-up A4 sheets showing blurry pictures of missing faces pleading to be found, digitised images of smoke billowing from that vertical coffin. Accusations – it’s not a tragedy it’s a massacre – taped above lists of the missing. It’s a desperate sight. Under the Westway, well away from the carnival route, I find the memorial garden and, finally, the blackened shadow of Grenfell Tower, after street upon street of yellow ribbons on trees, more missing posters, notes, hopes, drawings, poems, essays, flowers, fears, candles, hearts, memories, all the sadness and anger and love in the world parcelled up in thousands of tiny bundles.

In the social club behind this garden another steel band has its “pan yard”, its rehearsal space. Nostalgia, established 1965, are the last traditional pan-round-the-neck band on the road; in other words, they still walk the route playing the instruments rather than being carried by a float. Band leader Lionel McCalman tells me that four of the band had to be evacuated from their homes opposite Grenfell, but they will all definitely be on the road this year. A week after the fire, they played at a benefit concert where the garden is now.

“As a band we had a meeting,” says McCalman, “and we voted that at carnival we’d commemorate Grenfell. We’re playing Bridge Over Troubled Water and we’ll have Grenfell 2017 embroidered on our shirts. Artists around the area will decorate our float; hopefully we’ll do banners. The disaster has galvanised the community in a very positive way. The council is trying to get rid of these residents, the undesirables, the same way they are trying to get rid of carnival, and now we’re realising this is something that unites us all, we have to fight for it.”

I receive a link to a devastating video for a song called Ghosts of Grenfell, by rapper Lowkey with Asheber. It shows local people filmed around Grenfell, lip-syncing the lyrics: They say Yasin saw the fire and he ran inside. Twenty-year-old Yasin El-Wahabi was missing when Lowkey cut the track, but he was formally identified by his dental records yesterday (1 August). They found him on the 21st floor.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ghosts of Grenfell video.

Mas bands hold “mas camps”, like summer schools, where kids (and adults) can make, wear or help with costume production, while steel bands rehearse all year long. Carnival arts are good therapy for children still traumatised by the fire. “We did a Grenfell project in schools,” says artist Fiona Hawthorne. She’s a well-known local artist whose latest work, 150 Years, is being displayed on the Portobello Road – it’s a tribute to the road’s world-famous Portobello market. Fiona runs the UFO children’s steel band, which will have a 12 metre-long banner on the side of their truck displaying local children’s artwork.

“My daughter lives right by Grenfell, my son lost a friend,” she says, “so UFO went into local schools and did bereavement classes. It’s been so traumatic for the whole area, but the whole community has come together. Through it all, I was thinking, we’re getting ready for carnival while we still don’t know how many victims there are. What do I feel about this? Then I heard a BBC radio London show with people like Claire Holder and Alexander D Great explaining about carnival’s roots in oppression and coming together, sharing love, human kindness with each other and that was the turning point. Back on track. We’ve got to go ahead.”

One week to go



Jolene Durrant, 33, plays in Mangrove’s steel band but also has her own mas band, Too Fly, which holds camps in Crouch End. She’s been going to the carnival since she was six, and started playing in bands from the age of 11. “We normally start from right outside Grenfell Tower. I can’t be around there. I’ve been, but it breaks my heart, so I wouldn’t want that for my masqueraders. It’s a horrible, horrible feeling.” As a mark of respect to the dead, the bands have been told that if they normally join the route from Grenfell Tower, they should either change location or not play music until they reach the road.

I go back to the Flamboyan house and ask Cummins if she thinks the carnival will be different this year. “I don’t want it to be different,” she says quietly. “They may want to move carnival, but we can show respect for the survivors of Grenfell by just being what we are. Sometimes, it’s hard when you lose someone, especially in those kind of circumstances, to know precisely what you should do and how to do it. When my partner, Larry, died just before carnival five years ago, I said, ‘How am I going to carry on with this band?’ But then I also remembered something he said to me: ‘Don’t ever stop doing this because of me.’ So we made T-shirts with his face on the back. We paid respect to him on the road.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jolene Durrant making costumes for this year’s carnival. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

Pepe tells me that he isn’t sure he wants to continue running the carnival after this year, that he might be too old “for this nonsense”. But he admits he finds it hard to delegate and he’s unsure who would be best to succeed him in the big job. Perhaps the carnival should be more reflective of the community’s diversity again. But whatever happens, it should probably be the community that decides and locals entrusted with organising it.

If some of the seriousness of the carnival has been lost over the years, the tragedy of Grenfell and the silence of the masses at 3pm on Monday afternoon may help bring meaning to its traditions once again.

“The real culture of carnival has been lost,” observes Niles “Asheber” Hailstones. “This is the year that can give it meaning again.”

Former carnival chief executive Claire Holder hopes so. “Carnival is a very serious commemoration of release from slavery and the millions of Africans lost in slavery,” she says. She spent long summers making costumes in the church opposite Grenfell when she was in the Ebony band. “It’s as important as standing to attention in silence, deep in thought, on Remembrance Day.

“If we get it right, it would be the most powerful thing that we could do, to get that number of people quiet,” says Phillip. “I admit when I first heard, I thought it would never work. But why give up? We should be determined to do something that means something.”

Joe Delaney has been a powerful voice for the survivors over the last two months. After the fire, he was evacuated to Hammersmith from his home in Barandon Walk, one of three “finger blocks” on the Lancaster West Estate connected to the tower. I ask him what the feeling is among survivors about this year’s carnival.

“A few people are concerned there might be trouble,” he says. “But it will be down to the police and how they handle it. There was almost trouble [at Grenfell] the week after the fire. A few people were trying to storm the tower –I don’t know why. The community shut it down shoulder to shoulder with local police, pulled up the idiots that had come from all areas and told them to eff off.

“Are we going to do that with a million people? I don’t think so. And carnival has police from all over the country. Are they going to take a heavy hand? I’ll show my face and pay respect to those who can’t make it for one reason or the other. But they should never move carnival. If they take it away once, we’ll never get it back.”

Notting Hill Carnival takes place 27-28 August. Click here for details