The Preston Caribbean Carnival: the city's community summer carnival

A procession, a costume tradition and a sound system, in a city whose event geography gives it the same three grounds as everything else.

The Preston Caribbean Carnival is the city's community summer carnival, in the tradition of the British Caribbean carnival movement: a costumed procession, music, sound systems and food, staged in public space and free to walk into. It is one of the recurring items in Preston's annual calendar and one of the older community events in it.

The British carnival form has its own history, growing out of Caribbean communities in British cities from the 1950s onwards and combining Trinidadian carnival tradition with the specific circumstances of the places it took root in. Preston's is one of the northern examples, and like the others it is organised by the community, not by the council.

The procession and the costume

The procession is the centre of it and the costume is the craft. Carnival costume is made, never bought, over months, by people who do it every year, and that making is as much the event as the day itself. Anyone who treats a carnival as a parade to watch is missing the half of it that happens in workshops beforehand.

The route uses Preston's usual event geography: the streets between the Flag Market and the parks, which is the same line the Guild processions take and for the same reason — it is the only continuous processional route through the centre.

Where it happens

Like Preston Mela, the carnival needs open ground for the static half of the event and a street route for the procession, which in Preston means Avenham Park and the Flag Market with the streets between them. The city's short list of usable event sites shapes every large outdoor event it has.

That constraint is one of the more useful things to understand about Preston's calendar: knowing the three grounds tells you where to stand for almost anything, which the events sheet sets out.

Where it sits in the city's cultural life

The carnival, the Mela and the Chinese New Year observance are three of the principal community-organised strands of Preston's cultural year, and together they are larger than the council-organised programme on the Flag Market. That is the honest shape of the city's cultural life, and it is not visible from the centre on an ordinary day. Preston Pride is the fourth, and it faces the same constraint this page describes from the other end: a march needs a route, and a route needs somewhere to arrive.

The cultural annual events sheet covers the festival side and annual events the rest.

Date and route are set year by year

A community carnival is organised annually by its organisers, the date moves, and the route is set each year with the relevant permissions; a static page repeating any of it would send people to the wrong street on the wrong weekend.

What is stable is what the carnival is, what tradition it belongs to, and the fact that it will use the parks and the central processional route. The organisers publish the rest close to the day.

Carnival in the north of England

The British carnival movement is usually discussed through London, but the northern carnivals have their own history and in some cases an older one. Leeds, Manchester, Huddersfield and Preston all developed carnivals out of Caribbean communities that settled in industrial towns from the 1950s onwards, and each adapted the Trinidadian form to a different local geography.

Preston's constraint is the one that shapes all its events: a compact centre with a single processional route and a park at the end of it. That produces a carnival that is walkable end to end, which larger cities cannot offer, and correspondingly smaller.

The sound systems

Sound system culture is the other half of British carnival and it is often left out of descriptions of it. A sound system is not a PA: it is a crew, a set of speakers built and tuned by them, a selection and an operator, and the tradition around it is as developed and as competitive as the costume tradition.

At a carnival the static sound systems and the moving procession do different jobs — one holds a crowd in place, the other moves through the city — and the day works because both are happening. Anyone who follows only the procession has seen half of it.