The Mangrove Nine | Notting Hill Carnival 60

Between January 1969 and July 1970, the Mangrove restaurant on All Saints Road was raided by the police twelve times. No evidence of illegal activity was found. On 9 August 1970 the community marched in protest. Nine were arrested.

The 1971 trial at the Old Bailey became a landmark in Black British history — the first judicial acknowledgement of behaviour motivated by racial hatred in the Metropolitan Police. Jamila Bolton-Gordon, daughter of Rhodan Gordon who founded the Black People’s Information Centre at 301–303 Portobello Road, speaks about her father, the trial and what it means to carry that history.

She is joined by Dr Claire Holder OBE, barrister and former Chief Executive of Notting Hill Carnival, who provided legal support at the same Centre and brings that legal perspective to a case that changed British law, and by photographer Wayne Campbell, author of I Can’t Breathe, 0710 Year One and the forthcoming Carnival of Resistance, whose work documents Black resistance on London’s streets across two decades and draws the line from the Mangrove era to the public traditions of presence and protest that Carnival also stands within.