OPINION - I've spent 10 years selling food at Notting Hill Carnival: This is why it means so much to me

For onlookers, Notting Hill Carnival, now in its 60th year, is all Pretty Mas costumes, feathers and whistles and sound systems on floats, but often masked by overwhelming negative headlines that don’t truly reflect the spirit of the world’s second largest street festival.

Sat perfectly between two sound systems, the late August bank holiday weekend transforms his house into a command centre for entrepreneurialism.

He himself is serially business-minded, and growing up, no child, niece or nephew of his could sit idle when millions of carnival-goers would be at their front door.

Rose pictured with her husband Ndu

Supplied

My husband started selling whistles there as soon as he could talk, and that entrepreneurial spirit stuck.

He graduated from whistles to selling doughnuts at school, then eventually started his own business. I, meanwhile, married into the operation and was duly recruited too.

Nowadays, his uncle isn’t able to move around Carnival as he once was, sharply-suited for business every day of the week, so the rest of us are carrying his legacy forward.

We’ve been together for 15 years now, and for the last ten of them, we’ve run a food stall at the front of that same house.

Our first attempt was modest, with thermoses of jollof rice and plantain, hauling water around the street in wheelie bins for thirsty paraders.

A performer pictured during the Notting Hill Carnival in London on Monday, August 31

PA

Now you’ll find an evolved operation, with a jerk drum cooking up everything from chicken to burgers, doused in our secret sauce that keeps customers returning year after year.

So no, I’ve never really experienced Carnival other than by working it.

But what I do know, is that behind the mas bands and the two million people tailing them, is a largely self-built economy of families selling food, drinks, flags, whistles and souvenirs, and generations learning how to trade. It is children — now our own son too — discovering that their ideas can be worth something.

Nearly three-years old, our son’s first carnival was attended just a week before he was born, when I did an all-nighter at nine months pregnant assembling the drum barbecue. He’s grown up next to the sound systems each year, in awe at the size of them and the vibrating bass they let out.

Performers during Notting Hill Carnival 2026

PA

All the children in our family are increasingly further removed from the lands on the other side of the oceans that their grandparents crossed.

I feel this deeply myself being half-Jamaican, born and raised in London.

Our lives are simply ‘London’. But this legacy Carnival venture gives our children another living piece of the picture; the food, the music, the business, the people, the stories, all of it changed slightly with each generation.

There’s no need to choose between where our family came from and the city that raised us. We belong to both, and this is what it means to be a Londoner now.