Claudia Jones, Notting Hill Carnival's "founding spirit", honoured with blue plaque in South London
A 1959 event organised by the Trinidadian activist at St Pancras Town Hall was hailed as a forerunner to events like Notting Hill Carnival
Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian civil rights activist who organised London's first Caribbean carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in 1959, is set to be commemorated with an English Heritage blue plaque.
The plaque, one of many which marks the work and influence of important people from throughout English history, will be placed outside a house in Vauxhall, South London, where Jones lived for four years.
Born in 1915, Jones' event at St Pancras Town Hall, which was covered at the time by the BBC, is widely viewed as a key event for laying the path to other celebrations of Caribbean culture, such as carnivals in Bristol, Leeds, and of course West London's Notting Hill Carnival.
As a journalist and feminist activist, Jones dedicated much of her time to highlighting the culture of Britain's Afro-Caribbean communities during a period of significant racial violence which was directed at the Windrush Generation. Alongside the 1959 event at St Pancras Town Hall, she founded the West Indian Gazette in 1958. She passed away in 1964.
Find out more about Jones and the other historical figures who will be honoured with English Heritage blue plaques in 2023 here.
Last year, legendary DJ Tony De Vit was honoured with a blue plaque at Birmingham's Custard Factory studios. It wasn't the first electronic music-associated blue plaque to be installed in the UK, with one being founded at the previous site of legendary London record shop De Underground in 2021. Also in 2022, a plaque was raised at the original Shepherd's Bush site of pioneering Black British record label and store Peckings Records. A group also recently spray painted a number of unofficial blue plaque-style pieces on walls around London commemorating the late, great Andrew Weatherall.
