The Notting Hill Carnival celebrations ended yesterday, a celebration of Caribbean music, customs and traditions which over the years has earned the reputation of one of the largest street parade of Europe and held every year at the end of August in the homonymous district of London.
This year’s carnival also marked the 75th anniversary of the landing of the Empire Windrush, an important episode in the history of the country’s ethnic integration. On June 22, 1948 nearly five hundred people from Jamaica landed in Tilbury: it is considered the first large group of immigrants, from the West Indies, who moved to the United Kingdom after the Second World War.
The origins of the Notting Hill Carnival instead they date back to the early 1960s. In 1959 Claudia Jones, Trinidadian activist and founder of the West Indian Gazette, organized Caribbean Carnival festivities in St. Pancras Town Hall after the death of Kelso Cochrane, a 32-year-old Antigua native who was killed in an assault in Notting Hill, where he lived. Then in 1966 the activist Rhaune Laslett organized an event for the children of the neighborhood which turned into a celebration of the foreign community with music and dance, to ease the ethnic tension of those years.
Over the years, the carnival has attracted attention due to the frequent problems of public order (the very first demonstrations were an opportunity for young Caribbean people to clash with the police, also following the violence and abuse they were subjected to for the rest of the year) : 12,500 London Metropolitan Police officers were used this year, which it has made known of have arrested 275 people for a variety of crimes: possession of weapons and drugs, assaults and sexual offences.