Notting Hill: Riots, Racism and Policing
Britain after the War: Labour, Empire and Notting Hill
The Notting Hill of the 1950s sat at the meeting point of three national stories. The first was post-war reconstruction: the Blitz had destroyed thousands of London homes, and labour was needed for the rebuild, the new National Health Service and the public transport system. The second was the end of Empire: the 1948 British Nationality Act gave citizens of the colonies and Dominions the right to live and work in Britain, and the docking of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury on 22 June 1948 became the symbolic start of large-scale Caribbean migration. The third was a wider cultural change — what would later be called the ‘Swinging Sixties’ was visible in west London nightlife by the end of the 1950s. Notting Hill held all three together. Caribbean migrants were doing the labour the rebuild needed; the colour bar in housing concentrated them in Notting Hill; and a small but vocal group of white Londoners refused to accept the change.
The Notting Hill riots of 1958 cannot be understood without the wider context: post-war labour demand pulled Caribbean migrants to London, the 1948 British Nationality Act gave them the right to come, and the colour bar in housing concentrated them in Notting Hill, where a fascist revival under Oswald Mosley targeted them directly the following year.
The 1958 Notting Hill Riots
In the late August Bank Holiday weekend of 1958, groups of young white men — including teddy boys from the surrounding boroughs — carried out a series of coordinated attacks on Caribbean homes around Bramley Road and Latimer Road. Attacks ran night after night from 29 August to 5 September. Crowds of up to 400 people, armed with iron bars, knives, milk bottles and homemade petrol bombs, smashed windows and tried to set fire to houses where Caribbean families lived. The Metropolitan Police arrested around 140 people; ultimately nine white men were each sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay £500 by Mr Justice Salmon, who used his sentencing remarks to condemn the attacks — an unusually direct judicial response for the period. Caribbean residents organised defence committees to protect homes. Metropolitan Police files released in 2002 show that senior officers had assured the Home Secretary, Rab Butler, that there was little or no racial motive behind the disturbances, even though individual officers had said the opposite.
A common error is to describe the 1958 events as a clash ‘between the two communities’. Contemporary press accounts often used the phrase ‘race riot’, which suggested two groups in conflict on equal terms. The contemporary record does not support that framing. Metropolitan Police files released in 2002 record crowds of up to 400 white men, including teddy boys travelling in from outside the area, attacking houses where Caribbean families lived — and show senior officers telling the Home Secretary there was little racial motive, against the evidence of their own officers. Caribbean residents formed defence committees to protect those homes — a reactive rather than coordinated counter-attack. Strong answers describe the events as coordinated white attacks on Black homes, with Caribbean residents defending themselves, not as a symmetric riot.
The Murder of Kelso Cochrane (May 1959)
In the early hours of 17 May 1959, an Antiguan carpenter named Kelso Cochrane was attacked by a group of six white youths near the junction of Southam Street and Golborne Road, around the corner from Notting Hill. He was stabbed in the chest and died later in hospital. He was thirty-two years old. The murder was widely understood at the time as a racist killing — coming nine months after the riots and at a moment of high anti-immigrant feeling. The Metropolitan Police investigated for several months but no one was charged; the case remains formally unsolved. His funeral procession through Notting Hill on 6 June 1959 was the largest the area had seen, with around 1,200 mourners. Local Caribbean leaders, including the founders of the West Indian Gazette, used the funeral and the press coverage to demand stronger anti-discrimination law. Mark Olden’s 2011 research on the case identified a likely suspect from contemporary police records, but the Crown Prosecution Service has never reopened the case.
Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement
Within weeks of the 1958 riots, the former British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley announced he would stand in the constituency of North Kensington at the 1959 general election under the banner of the Union Movement. Mosley campaigned door-to-door across Notting Hill on a platform of compulsory repatriation of Black and Caribbean residents and a ban on further Commonwealth migration. His campaign meetings drew crowds in the hundreds and his name appeared on local walls. At the October 1959 election, Mosley received 2,821 votes — about 8% of the constituency total — finishing fourth and last, behind the Liberal candidate, and losing his deposit. The result was still much higher than commentators had predicted and showed that openly anti-immigrant politics had a meaningful local base in west London. Mosley failed to win the seat, but his campaign signalled to mainstream politicians that immigration could be made into a vote-winning issue — a signal that fed into the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and the wider hardening of British immigration policy through the 1960s.
A common simplification is to describe Mosley’s 1959 campaign as a fringe joke that nobody took seriously. The vote share tells a different story. Mosley’s 8% in North Kensington was an extraordinarily high vote for an openly fascist candidate in post-war Britain, in a seat Labour held by only 877 votes. He still came fourth of four and lost his deposit, so the significance lies in the size of the vote, not the placing. The campaign was a serious local result that fed into mainstream political calculation about immigration, and it should not be filed alongside obvious fringe candidacies. Strong answers note the eight per cent and explain its significance in a constituency where Caribbean migration had concentrated.
Policing in Notting Hill: Sus, Raids and the Drift to the Mangrove Crisis
From the late 1950s the Metropolitan Police’s relationship with Caribbean Notting Hill was already tense, and that tension hardened through the 1960s. A central tool was the sus law — the 1824 Vagrancy Act offence of being a suspected person loitering with intent. By the late 1960s the Met used sus heavily against young Black men in Notting Hill, despite there being no specific complaint of any actual offence. Caribbean cafes, shebeens and the Mangrove Restaurant on All Saints Road were repeatedly raided on drugs warrants, often returning no evidence. The pattern of repeated raids on the Mangrove between January 1969 and the summer of 1970 produced the protest march of August 1970 and led directly to the Mangrove Nine trial of 1971 (covered in the next lesson). No court had yet said anything on the record about racism inside the Met — that came in 1971, when the judge at the Mangrove Nine trial acknowledged evidence of racial hatred — but the daily experience for residents was of a force that treated them as suspects rather than as members of the public it served.
The 1958 riots, the May 1959 murder of Kelso Cochrane, Mosley’s 8% vote at the October 1959 election and the Met’s repeated use of sus and drugs raids together produced the political climate that turned Notting Hill into the centre of British Black activism by 1970. Each event built on the last; none should be read in isolation.