Notting Hill Carnival’s three-mile-long street parade, which celebrates Caribbean culture, normally has – deep breath – 70 performance stages, 18 steel-pan bands, two million attendees, 50,000 performers and 15,000 handmade costumes. Apparently, the sewing time to craft all those outfits is around one million hours. That’s 114 years.
Policeman on parade: this iconic image of the carnival was taken by photographer Frank Barratt in 1978
The first iteration in 1966, called the Notting Hill Fayre, was more low key. It was organised by local activist Rhaune Laslett and around 50 people turned up. By 1978, when this photograph by Frank Barratt was taken, there were more than 150,000 carnival-goers. Barratt was 34 and remembers how ‘friendly and fantastic and good-spirited’ the day was. ‘You could tell which policemen were game to join in,’ he says. Then it was just a matter of saying to the women, ‘Go on, go over there and make a fuss of that policeman!’
