Notting Hill

This guide to Notting Hill in London opens on the night of August 29, 1958, when riots swept through the neighbourhood's Caribbean streets. It follows Claudia Jones, a Trinidad-born activist deported from the United States during the McCarthy era, who had settled here and started a newspaper for the West Indian community. You'll hear how she resolved to answer the violence with something else entirely, filling St Pancras Town Hall with steel bands and calypso singers in January 1959. She had arrived in Notting Hill only a few years earlier, when it was among London's poorest, most overcrowded districts.