A few years ago, as I stood making small talk at a house party with a rather posh-sounding man I’d just met, I mentioned that I was going to Notting Hill Carnival that weekend and offhandedly invited him along. “Oh god, I’d never go there,” he said, seemingly incredulous at the suggestion. “I’ve heard it’s absolutely depraved.” I quickly made my excuses and slipped away, but for a while afterwards, I couldn’t shake the interaction. Where had he got this impression, delivered so matter-of-factly and dripping with disdain, of a place he had never even been? And one so completely at odds with the Carnival I knew?
It is indicative of the mythology that surrounds Carnival: an event that millions experience as joyous, communal and entirely ordinary, but which, in the popular imagination, has somehow become synonymous with disorder, a spectre onto which wider anxieties about multiculturalism are projected.
