Revelers fill the streets of London as Notting Hill Carnival celebrates Caribbean culture

LONDON (AP) – Hundreds of hundreds of revelers filled the streets of west London on Monday during the climax of Notting Hill Carnival, one of the world’s largest celebrations of Caribbean music and culture.

Organizers say as many as 2 million individuals are expected to enjoy music, parades, dancing and food over the two days of Europe’s largest street party, which began on Sunday with a kid’s parade.

The history of the carnival dates back to 1958, when Trinidadian human rights activist Claudia Jones began organizing a rally to unite the community after a series of racist attacks on black people in Notting Hill.

Founded in 1964 with several Trinidadian steel bands, it has grown into a large annual street party featuring colourful floats, hundreds of calypso dancers in spectacular feathered costumes, nearly 20 steel bands and over two dozen sound systems.

The carnival returned to the narrow streets of the district last 12 months, after two years when it needed to be held online because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This 12 months’s event coincides with the seventy fifth anniversary of the arrival in England of the Empire Windrush, the ship carrying a whole bunch of people from the Caribbean to a brand new life in the UK. The journey became an emblem of the post-war mass migration that modified Britain and its culture.

This journey has not all the time been easy, as was revealed when some members of the Windrush generation became embroiled in a British immigration crackdown that inappropriately targeted legal residents, mainly from the Caribbean and other parts of the former British Empire.