Weeks before Carnival begins, the city is already stirring. In school halls, children stamp out dance steps their great grandparents refused to forget. In community centres, men and women bend wire, cloth and sequins, working through the night because culture does not build itself. In the pan yards, steelbands play until the walls shake, reminding London that we are here. This labour of love - unpaid, unseen, uncelebrated - is what makes Carnival. And it never makes the headlines.
What does make the headlines are the familiar warnings: too costly, too dangerous, too unruly for the streets of west London. The same predictions of chaos are wheeled out year after year. And yet, every August Bank Holiday, the people come. Over a million. They come because Carnival is more than a party. It is freedom rehearsed in public. It is culture lived in fullness. It is medicine for a city that badly needs it.
