Read an excerpt from Dan Hancox′s new book, Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World

Re-thinking long-held beliefs about crowd behaviour, journalist, author and Crack contributor Dan Hancox’s new title analyses the role crowds play in our lives – from parties to politics to policing – and the potential they hold as a force for change. In this excerpt, he explores the roots and evolution of one of the UK’s most beloved music events – Notting Hill Carnival.

The roots of Carnival in London go back to the Caribbean, and the roots of Carnival in the Caribbean go back to the era of transatlantic slavery. Colonial plantation masters would host masquerade balls as a last blowout before the abstinence of Lent, celebrations from which the Africans they had enslaved were banned. The attempted eradication of African cultural practices and social life, as a denial of the humanity of enslaved people, was a key part of the process. But the enslaved communities created their own festivities nonetheless, based on their own dance traditions, mocking their plantation masters through masquerade (or ‘mas’) and satirical calypso songs.  

Notting Hill Carnival sits directly in this lineage, and likewise arose – as did Pride in New York – out of a very specific and marginalised political struggle. Following the arrival of more than 300,000 Caribbean people in Britain, beginning when the flagship Empire Windrush docked in the Thames in 1948, many Caribbean Britons settled in Notting Hill. Though the imperial motherland had called upon them to come, to rebuild a country devastated by war, they were not made welcome. They encountered regular discrimination and racist violence, from the organised far right, the Metropolitan police and the general population.  

In May 1958, a young Antiguan called Kelso Cochrane was murdered by six alleged members of the White Defence League in Notting Hill. There were no arrests. Rioting and further violent attacks from neo-Nazis followed in August of that year. Racial discrimination was still legal in Britain, meaning a ‘colour bar’ in pubs and cultural spaces was often in place, at the whim of white venue owners and landlords. 

On 30 January, 1959, the Trinidad-born Marxist journalist and activist Claudia Jones organised the first ‘Caribbean Carnival’ in St Pancras Town Hall – a show of community solidarity, strength and joy in the face of persistent oppression and violence. The steel pans and other bands, the processions and costuming, and the bass-heavy DIY sound systems steadily developed from there. It became an annual event, growing in size each year. 

In the souvenir programme for London’s first Caribbean Carnival in 1959, Claudia Jones addressed the need for pan-Caribbean unity in the face of racist violence, indeed murder, and paid tribute to “the role of the arts in bringing people together for common aims”. The idea that political unity and even resistance can be achieved through conviviality and crowd joy did not begin in St Pancras Town Hall that January, but something else important did. 

In Jones’s words, Carnival is the “spirit of a people that cannot be contained, that which therefore contains the genesis of their own (self-articulated) freedom”. The political power of the carnivalesque crowd was inscribed on it from the start. And when there is so much liberatory strength to be found in gathering together to dance, sing and raise a glass, no wonder those in power always want to break up the party. 

Although the event is increasingly attended by enthusiasts of every ethnic heritage, Matthew Phillip, CEO of the Notting Hill Carnival Trust, is keenly aware of the event’s specifically Caribbean roots. Above his desk in west London hangs a 19th-century drawing, Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad, by a visiting British artist called Melton Prior. The gleeful Black dancers in the centre of the drawing are dressed as devils, aristocrats and harlequins, their legs and arms alive with motion, while a supercilious white vicar looks on from the side of the road.

Trinidad’s plantation-owning European colonial elites had banned Black people from their Mardi Gras balls, banned them from celebrations in the streets, and later in the 19th century, when they formed their own carnivals in response, banned them from drumming. The great significance of the drawing, Phillip says, is that the crowd of Black carnival-goers occupies the middle of the street, at long last – holding a mirror up to their devilish masters, the people who would deny them this essential right, and rite. 

“Carnival is about the people reclaiming the streets for a couple of days of the year to express themselves,” Phillip tells me. For someone who is effectively the most senior Carnival bureaucrat, he seems relaxed about how official everything needs to be. “Residents selling homemade food on their doorsteps, or a random guy going around selling snow cones, who is, you know, not quite legit – all these little ingredients add to the event. You might get one or two drummers that plot up somewhere on the street and just start playing.”

As long as everyone’s safe and happy, he says, this is how it should be. “Carnival belongs to the people – we’re merely custodians, trying to make it happen in a safe way and protect its culture. But it belongs to the people, and the people will always ensure that it remains on the streets. The essence of Carnival is that celebration of freedom, and participation. I like to say it’s a participation sport, rather than a spectator sport.” 

Phillip has been part of Carnival his entire life – his father was a co-founder of the Mangrove Steelband, and he’s always played steel pans, or drums, or worn a costume. He has a calm demeanour, which helps when dealing with the vortex of organisational stresses and issues on Carnival weekend itself. Running Carnival has always seemed like a phenomenally difficult job, a thankless task loaded with risk, with large parts of the white British establishment (the right-wing press, Tory politicians, wealthy local residents) desperate to see you fail. 

Of course, managing such a production could never be just one person’s job, or responsibility. It is an extremely complex, indeed crowd-like negotiation, between an endless array of institutional bodies and community stakeholders, sound system providers, bands, grassroots organisations, food stalls – and the two million carnival-goers themselves.  

Springing to life early in the morning on the first day of Carnival, a central operations room in a local school oversees everything. Representatives of the ambulance services, the Met, the fire brigade, TFL and the British Transport Police, the two local authorities (Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea), the licensing team, the Greater London Authority, the communications team, the health and safety team, and St John Ambulance come together for regular updates, questions, concerns, fire-fighting and monitoring, via endless banks of cameras and on-the-ground reports. 

There are a lot of moving parts even before the crowd raises its first plastic cup of rum, or pot of glitter. The paperwork alone has the potential to suffocate this mass joy, and it would be quite easy for this to become a carnival of bureaucracy: permits, licences, bills, invoices, contracts, all fluttering down from the west London sky like grim confetti. When his organisation took over the official running of Carnival in 2018, Phillip had other ideas about how to keep the crowd both safe and happy. 

“The first thing we did, and the most significant thing we did, was to remove as many barriers as we possibly could,” he said. Those waist-high metal barriers – known as ‘Met barriers’, after the police force who are so fond of them – were everywhere, causing unexpected and unpleasant surprises in dense crowds, impeding people’s freedom of movement.

“As an event organiser, I think the worst thing you can do is place barriers that are not there on a normal day. If you’re in the Carnival crowd, walking through narrow streets like Notting Hill, you can look up, and use the buildings to guide you, to give you an idea of where there’s a road, and where there might be space. But it won’t tell you if somebody’s placed a barrier across the road you’re walking down – your sight is limited.” Even parts of the year-round street furniture are removed for the duration of Carnival, to facilitate fluid movement around the site: there are places where removable traffic islands have been installed, so they can be lifted out for the weekend. 

Matthew Phillip’s office in the Tabernacle in Notting Hill – a grandiose 19th-century church turned into a bustling community hub, decorated with Carnival photos and mementos – means he is embedded in these streets all year round. Which is fortunate, as it’s a year-round job. Next to his desk, a large paper map is displayed, with a red line for the parade route and a series of colour-coded blocks for the different bands, sound systems, stages and other major attractions – orange for the masquerade bands, yellow for the Brazilian bands, green for the steel pans. 

The NHC Trust have worked with numerous sophisticated computer-modelling companies, consultancies and other cutting-edge crowd technologists. They have used heat-mapping tools to track crowd density, watched countless videos from inside and above the crowd to refine mobility around the site, and even deployed a police helicopter for a dynamic aerial view. But to manage these many moving parts, sometimes nothing beats the ‘board game pieces on a giant paper map’ approach beloved of 18th-century naval captains. 

Phillip and his team spend a lot of time thinking about crowds, and how they move. “My favourite personal theory about crowds is that they’re like water,” he says. They can flow into unexpected places, seep through gaps invisible to the naked eye, and “find space to go into even if it looks far too tight. Some people are comfortable in tight crowds. If there’s a need, they’ll find the space.”