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The Notting Hill Carnival is taking place this bank holiday weekend and is expected to attract more than one million people to the event.
The day is all about Afro-Caribbean communities coming together to celebrate their own cultures and traditions.
The carnival is full of an array of amazing sounds and colours which is why we decided to give you 10 facts about the carnival.
- The first carnival took place in 1966
- It’s the largest street festival in Europe and the second largest in the world!
- The Carnival is as big as 11 Glastonbury festivals
- There’s 15,000 costumes on display and everyone is made by hand.
- On a Sunday it’s tradition among some carnival-goers to slap anyone in the vicinity with a handful of melted chocolate.
- The very first carnival events were arranged as a demonstration of racial unity after the Notting Hill race riots of 1938.
- Amazingly, Laslett’s Notting Hill festival was inspired by a dream she had about people of different races dancing in the streets.
- Legendary rock band Pink Floyd played one of their first ever gigs as part of the original festival.
- Popular radio broadcasts between 1973 and 1975 established the carnival as a national event, and in 1976 over half a million people attended
- A video of policemen dancing at the 2013 carnival has had 1.1 million Youtube views.
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