For the best part of a decade, Rose Winter has spent Notting Hill Carnival weekend on the other side of the crowds, covered in smoke and charcoal. Now in its 60th year, the festival is often masked by overwhelming negative headlines that don't truly reflect the spirit of the world's second largest street festival, she writes.
A Family Legacy at the Heart of Carnival
Winter's husband's uncle arrived from Nigeria in the 60s, making a home on what would become the very heart of Notting Hill Carnival. Sat perfectly between two sound systems, the late August bank holiday weekend transforms his house into a command centre for entrepreneurialism. Serially business-minded, no child, niece or nephew of his could sit idle when millions of carnival-goers would be at their front door.
Her husband started selling whistles there as soon as he could talk, graduating to selling doughnuts at school before eventually starting his own business. Winter married into the operation and was duly recruited. Nowadays, the uncle isn't able to move around Carnival as he once was, sharply-suited for business every day of the week, so the rest of the family is carrying his legacy forward.
From Thermoses to a Jerk Drum
Together for 15 years, the couple has run a food stall at the front of that same house for the last ten. Their first attempt was modest, with thermoses of jollof rice and plantain, hauling water around the street in wheelie bins for thirsty paraders. Now the operation has evolved, with a jerk drum cooking up everything from chicken to burgers, doused in a secret sauce that keeps customers returning year after year.
Behind the mas bands and the two million people tailing them is a largely self-built economy of families selling food, drinks, flags, whistles and souvenirs, and generations learning how to trade. It is children — now their own son too — discovering that their ideas can be worth something.
What It Means to Be a Londoner
Nearly three years old, their son's first carnival was attended just a week before he was born, when Winter did an all-nighter at nine months pregnant assembling the drum barbecue. He has grown up next to the sound systems each year, in awe at the size of them and the vibrating bass they let out.
All the children in the family are increasingly further removed from the lands on the other side of the oceans that their grandparents crossed. Winter feels this deeply herself, being half-Jamaican, born and raised in London. This legacy Carnival venture gives their children another living piece of the picture: the food, the music, the business, the people, the stories, all of it changed slightly with each generation. There's no need to choose between where the family came from and the city that raised them. They belong to both, and this is what it means to be a Londoner now.
