Now that the festive season is here, did you know...

The first ever Notting Hill Carnival was created in response to the previous year's racial riots in the area and the state of race relations at the time?

In the beginning, the Carnival was useful and promoted as a kind of ‘healing’ ceremonial – initially indoors- in the period immediately following the 1958 Notting Hill riots, as an annual event, initiated by the extraordinary Claudia Jones (activist, Marxist, womanist) and, eventually, in the late 1960s on the streets, as the most joyful element of a little Notting Hill Fair, launched by another woman, Rhaune Laslett (community activist). By the late 1970s, this gathering had taken on a proportion and a social significance that no one had anticipated.

The Mangrove restaurant come community hub situated on the All Saints Road, now only a memory, which with its Mangrove masquerade-band and steel-pan orchestra was one of the foundation sites of the Carnival; also spark of a state vs people confrontation that resulted in perhaps the most famous anti-racist victory in 20th century British history. The All Saints Road, where this restaurant was, is the notorious ‘frontline’ of a Caribbean migrant-settler area from the 1950s to the 1980s, now a street dotted with expensive designer item businesses, bars and eating places with the reggae record-shop and Caribbean-cuisine remnant the Tabernacle, once an Evangelical church, but since the late 1960s a community centre building serving a constantly shifting diversity of local residents from a myriad of national and ethnic origins where I worked a couple of years ago and I found amazing archival photos.