An English Carnival – Hayling Island: Back in the 1930s and 1950s every town or even village of a reasonable size would have an annual carnival where the inhabitants dressed up to take part in a carnival parade with groups competing with each other to create the best float. And there would be a carnival queen and a fancy dress competition, baby show, dog show and a good deal of largely harmless fun.
I think it was the growth of television that really killed most of these off. Rather than going out and making their own fun people entertained themselves by sitting in front of the box and watching others doing things. Organising carnivals involved a lot of work and fewer and fewer people came to join the carnival committee who did most of it. Our local carnival ended I think in the 1980s, though there is still one in a nearby town.
Carnivals also involved adults and children working together, something that became rather more problematic with media campaigns on “stranger danger” (family, relatives and friends are more often the problem.) Photographing children also became more difficult – and events involving them were one of the few things where I made sure always to wear my press card visibly to reassure people.
I think it was the disappearing of English carnivals that led to the Arts Council to give a grant to a couple of my friends to record those still taking place. And occasionally I would be persuaded to join one or both of them to go along with them.
Hayling Island on August 2nd 2008 was one of these occasions – and I’d also been there in 2001 and 2005.
Hayling Island is an island close to Porsmouth on the South Coast and has a road bridge from the mainland – there used also to be a railway but Beeching cut this in 1963 and the rail bridge was demolished three years later.
In the mid-20th century Hayling Island was a popular holiday resort for Londoners – part of part of ‘London-by-the-sea’ – and its population doubled in the summer months. Rather fewer go there now, but it remains a seaside resort.
In 2008 Hayling Island Carnival still had all the things an English Carnival should have – and you can see some in my pictures. But a few years later the carnival seems to have come to an end because of a shortage of volunteers.
Later in 2008 together with friends we held the show ‘English Carnival’ during the East London Photo Festival in a gallery in Shoreditch. Although the show is long closed you can still see all the work online.
Although many traditional English Carnivals have disappeared, new carnivals have come to take their place, and I’ve photographed a number of these. While the other photographers had pictures from traditional English carnivals, my contribution to that show was a set of 20 black and white pictures NOTTING HILL CARNIVAL 1990-2001
More on My London Diary from Hayling Island Carnival 2008.
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Tags: baby show, carnival, carnival queen, dog show, East London Photo Festival, English Carnival, fancy dress, harmless fun, Hayling Island, holiday resort., princesses, Shoreditch