Notting Hill Carnival

August 2022 return

When we first moved to Notting Hill, we didn’t think much about Carnival Weekend. It wasn’t that we were avoiding it, as some of our neighbours and nearly all the shops do. We’d just made other plans, unaware of what else was so famously happening on the Bank Holiday calendar, the last weekend of August.

Then Covid came and the two and a half million people expected every year, all missed the world’s second largest street festival, cancelled for the last two years. (Rio de Janeiro Carnival in Brazil is the biggest).

Boys From The Black Stuff

This year, we watched as the designer clothes emporiums and food stores, stuffed with organic goodness, got a makeover from white van men. The fresh chipboard covering the shop frontages, provided a perfect canvas for London taggers (graffiti artists) to add colour with their monikers. The effect was quite startling. London W11 was transformed in a few short hours, to inner city Liverpool in the 1980s and the backdrop to Boys From The Black Stuff (Alan Bleasdale), a story which follows the lives of five unemployed men.