Happy Halloween! Not.
In Notting Hill it’s been All Out All Hallows Eve since around early September and today, 31/10/2024, is the apogee of this unprecedented orgy of waste, tat and excess.
Back in the good old days of yore, my children would attire themselves in their Batman and Robin and Little Mermaid costumes and scamper round the neighbours’ houses for a couple of hours trick or treating.
The convention then was this: if there was a pumpkin on the stoop, you could ring the bell. The Mummy — and as we live in Notting Hill, The Mummy would be someone like Claudia Schiffer, Elle MacPherson, Jade Jagger, Emma Freud or similar, and so Daddies would often make themselves available to shepherd their children from door to door on this occasion — sorry, got sidetracked, where was I? Oh yes. The Mummy would be there in a fright wig with a bowl of Celebrations.
That was then. Now professional designers and decorators come in on unlimited budgets to pimp houses and gardens with skeletons, rats eating corpses, tombstones, giant spiders, skulls, and turn entire streets into a Thriller video.
The Hallowe’en decorations in one street – Elgin Crescent – have become a tourist attraction (check out my Instagram @racheljohnsonpublic for the kompromat, I’ve been keeping photographic evidence). It’s bigger than Christmas here as at Christmas “everyone” goes to their second and third homes. Halloween is now a near billion pound industry, four times as big in money terms as it was when my kids were at school.
As Helen Kirwan-Taylor in the Times reported yesterday: “Halloween in Notting Hill, west London, used to be for kids: now it’s a hen fight between competitive residents (many of them in the film business) as well as an influencer feeding frenzy. The trend is, of course, led by the resident American bankers (whose rents are paid by their firms) and money is no object…”
This is not one of those rants against the US import or my American gastarbeiten and neighbours, or about how much I prefer Guy Fawkes to this gaudy carnival.
My objection to Hallowe’en is on aesthetic and above all environmental grounds
My objection to Hallowe’en is on aesthetic — it’s so hideous, as are all those sexy OTT costumes — and above all environmental grounds. Hallowe’en is already the biggest single-use plastic event of the year, during which a billion pounds worth of synthetic and plastic tat is bought and then chucked in landfill.
This is the real horror of Hallowe’en, given that representatives of 175 countries endorsed a resolution at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi in 2022 to end plastic pollution, and to put something in place to seal the deal legally by the end of this year (the race is on to get a draft text for a treaty the next meeting of the UN subcommittee next month in Busan, South Korea).
Back in the hopeful days of 2022, before the world was distracted by Ukraine and Gaza, the leader of that Nairobi meeting said, “the treaty is expected to tackle plastic through its life cycle, including its production, design and disposal.” Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme even said, “Today marks a triumph by planet Earth over single-use plastics.”
I invite Inger and the UN to come to Notting Hill, and Primrose Hill, to assess the triumph of single use plastic against the global will. When I walk around my neighbourhood today the excrescences are more excessive than ever.
Look, I can see it’s fun for kids, and slebs. It’s Instatastic. But what are the moms and pops going to do with the life-size skeletons, the ten-foot Grim Reaper with scythe, the tombstones made of actual cement, the monster skulls, the hugey-wugey spiders crawling the walls, tomorrow — at a time when the world has promised to do something about plastic and polymer production, all of which is terrible for the environment and a huge contributor to greenhouse gases?
When I complained to a local councillor, she agreed. “I’m going to recommend that next year everyone aims for a sustainable Hallowe’en,” she said. I will hold her and the Royal Borough to that. Let’s ban plastic flowers and displays on retail shopfronts and restaurants too across London while we’re at it.
Elgin Crescent, where I lived since 1979, looks like a film set (indeed, Disclaimer on Apple TV with Cate Blanchett is filmed there) but it is actually a crime scene.
Will the last trick or treater to leave Notting Hill please turn off the lights — or I’ll turn you into pumpkin.
Rachel Johnson is a contributing editor of the London Standard
