The New Carnival Company.

Lead Organisation.

The New Carnival Company (NCC) is a pioneering arts development organisation based on the Isle of Wight specialising in carnival and outdoor public celebrations. 

They are based at The Coaching House in Ryde, a creative workspace and administrative suite with facilities for production, teaching and small-scale conferencing. They deliver an extensive community outreach and carnival arts training programme across the Island, the South of England, nationally and internationally.

The New Carnival Company kick-starts the Island carnival season with The Isle of Wight Mardi Gras, held annually at the end of the school summer term. The Mardi Gras is a best practice example of carnival in education, engaging over 30 schools and community groups from across the Island in learning, making, and performing on the streets.

The New Carnival Company established Island Carnival Memories to gather stories which would inform a live carnival re-imagining and performance at their Mardi Gras parade 2020, themed The Story of Carnival. This outcome was impacted by Covid19, but was finally presented in Ryde Town Centre in August 2021, called A Rather Bewildering Spectacle.

InspirEd helps to provide learning opportunities using museums and heritage sites to enable people to engage with the past.

Its director, Lisa Kerley, has a wide range of expertise in museum and heritage learning including developing learning programmes, access and outreach, community and adult learning, reminiscence, and oral history.

Lisa undertook all the Interviews for Island Carnival Memories, producing Biogs for each contributor and soundbites for the site. She also trained several local people and schoolchildren in reminiscence techniques, to enable them to confidently host memory sharing sessions and participate in the gathering of our stories.

Lisa works closely with Carisbrooke Castle Museum and has collaborated on several very successful projects stored within their Oral History Collection: Island Voices, including Newport Living History, Memories of the Sea and Farming Memories.

Carisbrooke Castle Museum is an Accredited local history museum run by an independent Charitable Trust, sited within a medieval castle in the care of English Heritage.

It was founded in 1898 by HRH Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, as a memorial to her husband, Prince Henry of Battenberg.

The Museum cares for over 30,000 items connected with the Isle of Wight, including social history, medieval history, King Charles I, ecclesiastical history, costume, military history, photographs, paintings, decorative art, ephemera, and documents.

Over the last few years Carisbrooke Castle Museum has been involved in an increasing number of oral history projects, working with the community to record the memories of local people. These recordings are currently being catalogued into the museum’s permanent collection and in the future will be available to researchers and for use in exhibitions and other publicly accessible ways.