After Grenfell: a carnival to remember

The Guardian

Following the fire at the west London tower block, there were new calls for the Notting Hill carnival to be relocated. But counting down to this year’s event, locals and carnival makers remain adamant that it should stay put – and pay respect to the victims

On 6 July, three weeks after a still-unknown number of people died in the Grenfell Tower fire, Greg Hands MP, minister for London, wrote an open letter to London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, to ask whether it was “appropriate” to hold Notting Hill carnival in the “proximity of a major national disaster”. Khan moved swiftly to dismiss Hands’s intervention, replying that any attempt to move the carnival would be a mistake “at a time when the community has little trust in those in positions of authority… It is only right that this year’s carnival marks the terrible tragedy at Grenfell Tower and the mayor will work closely with the organisers and the wider community to ensure they are consulted and involved in the planning for an appropriate commemoration.”

People see ghosts, hear the screams at night… All of us here that morning saw what was happening behind those windows

“We need carnival more than ever now,” agrees Emma Dent Coad, the new Labour MP for Kensington (full disclosure: I canvassed for her during the general election). She won her seat by just 20 votes in June from Conservative Victoria Borwick and lives close to Grenfell. The fire happened four days after the third recount confirmed her election and she’s been working closely with the traumatised community ever since. “My predecessor, Victoria Borwick, was very keen on moving it too. And Greg Hands is in the next office to mine! He could have asked me. He was grandstanding with no plan whatsoever. It’s disgraceful really.”

Carnival can only happen every year with the help of tens of thousands of volunteer participants, overseen by the London Notting Hill Carnival Enterprises Trust (LNHCET). The trust is funded by Kensington and Chelsea council (most of the carnival area is in the borough; about 15% to the east and north is in neighbouring Westminster) and represents the various artistic arenas of carnival: masquerade or mas (costume), pan (steel band), calypso, soca, and static and mobile sound systems.

“One of the Grenfell survivors wrote a letter to the trust, imploring us to keep going,” says trustee Kemi Sobers, controller of the carnival’s world music stage. “They’d lost four of the five members of their family. One of our calypsonians [calypso musicians] lives right opposite; there are members with people still missing; a friend of my father’s is still missing. It’s just tough; we feel it deeply.”

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