Every year, the Notting Hill Carnival is held on the August bank holiday weekend. It is a Caribbean flavoured festival and is the second biggest street festival in the world (after Rio). The parade route goes right past our front door and we had a fantastic view from our living room window.

Well, we had a fantastic view once we arrived home. We tried to cram it in all in to our bank holiday weekend. We organised a last minute a trip to Scotland (the purposes of which were not entirely recreational... more to come) and when booking our flights home we decided to try and catch the tail end of carnival Monday.

Getting home mid-carnival was a bit of a challenge. Ladbroke Grove, our closest tube station was closed and thousands of people were using Notting Hill Gate tube station. We decided to tube it to Holland Park, which is a little further afield and hoof it. Walking down the hill from Holland Park to our house we had a fantastic view of the carnival in full swing. All you could see was a sea of people bobbing up and down to a Caribbean beat.

This view was a little stressing to us as we knew we had to wade through that crowd to get home. Poor Andrew was dragging our rollie luggage which was not an easy feat. We got a few strange looks and I'm sure most people were wondering what kind of idiot brings luggage to a street party. Eventually we made it to our front door, stepped over the pile of rubbish that had accumulated on our door step and retreated to sanity.

We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out our window watching the parade go by and bopping to the music. Parade is a very loose term as there wasn't a steady stream of floats. There also weren't any barriers preventing the crowd from getting up close and personal. Floats would go by every now and then with a mobile crowd attached. It seemed that carnival goers would pick a float they liked and follow the parade route with the float.


Sea of people is the right metaphor to describe the crowd, as there were definitely waves of people. Sometimes we wouldn't be able to see the road outside because of the number of people and sometimes there'd only be 50 or so revellers outside. I think it was a great way to do the parade. It gave people an escape route from the madness. I don't think the Grove's narrow streets would deal with a traditional parade.


Seven o'clock arrived, the official finishing time, and floats were still going by our house. An hour later, floats were still going past and a line down the road showed that there were several more to come. I think they were doing laps of the route. Sadly, at around 9:30pm, the happy, dancing crowd turned in to an angry, bottle-throwing mob. A group of young boys started throwing bottles at the police and all hell broke loose. It was a sad end to a really fun day.

The police response was aggressive. Large groups of police officers raced up our street and formed human barriers. They created several lines across Ladbroke Grove, some lines pushed the crowd north and others pushed the crowd south. Effectively, they squeezed the crowd out of Notting Hill. There were hundreds of police officers dressed in fluorescent yellow parkas outside our house.


Andrew and I watched the police operation from our window while we ate our dinner. It was dinner and a show! A group of kids loitered around 40m away from the police line. Every now and again a boy would dart out from the safety of the group and pelt a bottle at the police line. The police weren't wearing any protective clothing apart from parkas and bobby hats. I'm surprised that more of them weren't injured by flying glass. (The papers say that only one officer was injured.)


We watched until stray missiles started to crash on our window ledge. We then drew our blinds and turned off our living room lights. Every now and again I'd peek out to see what was going on. I saw the arrival of the riot police but not the action. At around 11:30pm, Andrew and I went to bed to the sounds of helicopters and police sirens. Luckily, our sound-proofing is quite good so it was no more than a distant buzz.

This morning I woke up expecting to see the after-math and was greeted with clean streets. Gone was the carpet of rubbish and all the shattered glass. Shops that had wisely boarded up their windows for the carnival had taken down the coverings and were now open for business. The organisers/council had done a very impressive job on the clean up.

More photos on Flickr...