About Us
Carnival Day
Whitstable Carnival Association is pleased to announce that the town’s 127th anniversary carnival will provisionally take place, as it traditionally does, on the first Saturday in August 2024, which this year is August 3rd.
Assemble along Pier Avenue and Northwood Road from 1pm.Post code for sat navs CT5 2BB
The procession moves off at 5.30, travelling along Tankerton Road, Tower Parade, Harbour Street, High Street, Oxford Street and Canterbury Road to Saddleton Road, where we will disperse. This usually takes around two hours. During this time there will be road closures on all adjoining roads.
If you need to travel to Whitstable at this time, please be patient, choose another route, travel early or delay your journey till its over.
Carnival Ethos
The purpose of Carnival is to bring the community together and to raise funds for various local charities. Carnival welcomes everyone and makes no distinctions based on class or race or age or sex. All you need to take part is a sense of fun. Carnival is play. It is frivolity. It is fantasy. It is a joyous expression of who we are as a community. It is an opportunity to show your wares, whether as a business or a charity or as a community organisation. It is about showing off. Show us who you are. Tell us what you are proud of. Make yourselves known. Be as bold as you like. Be as silly as you like. Be funny. Be friendly. Be kind. Be generous. Be a part of your community.
Local Charities
We are proud to donate all the money raised on Carnival day to local Charities, all do valuable work for the community.We raise money to fund the Carnival day itself, all year round with local events supporting local venues.Including this years great Fiesta on the Beach music festival, which was a great success.
Over the last 2 years we donated over £6200 to these great local charities
- SOS Whitstable
- Haven Project
- League of friends
- Farskate
- Kent School of Performing Arts
- Whitstable Museum
- CT5 Forum
- Whitstable Beach Pastors
- Air Ambulance
- Revival Cafe
- 2nd Sea Scouts
- Happy Here
- The league of friends Kent & Canterbury Hospitals
- The Far Academy
- Kent School of Performing Arts
- Age UK Herne Bat
- Citizens Advice Bureau
- Whitstable RNLI
History
The First Whitstable Carnival took place in 1897, but Carnival itself is much older than that. The word is from the Latin “carne levare” meaning “leaving meat”. Traditionally in the Middle Ages it took place around shrovetide, when the winter stores were used up in one final blow-out feast before the rigours of Lent. Later Carnivals adopted the format but altered the time. Our Whitstable Carnival is a more modest affair, although, looking at old photos – such as those in the Douglas West collection, currently held in the museum – you can see that people did whatever they could to make it as fun and as exciting as possible. So far it has survived two world wars and a pandemic.
We hope that it will continue for many more years to come. Our thanks go out to the two Carols, Sims and Simmonds, and to all the other members of the previous Carnival Association, who kept the tradition going through the years. In February 2019 they retired en masse. After that a new bunch of enthusiasts took over. The 2019 Carnival was our first attempt at running such an event, and by all accounts the town approved of our efforts.