Tours of our Carnival Control Centre, in its bunker deep below Greenham Common are, for obvious reasons, suspended during the critical weeks leading up to the big event. But we thought that this year’s article about the CCC should answer one of the questions most frequently asked of our Carnival Controllers: “OK, I can see that you have a route planned out in advance, like, but how on earth do you ensure that the carnival stays on that route from beginning to end?”

It’s a great question, of course. You can imagine the chaos that would ensue if the Carnival Parade didn’t follow the designated route and ended up at, say, the retail park or even (a possibility that keeps our team awake at night) accidentally headed up the A339 and then to London along the M4.

In the old days, when steering the Carnival along its route depended on a complicated system of ropes and pulleys, a CRA (Critical Routage Anomaly, as it’s known to modern CCs [Carnival Controllers]) was a frequent event. Many was the time that a rope breakage resuled in the Parade ending up in the wrong place; perhaps most famously in 1853, when the Parade set out in reverse from Pound Street and along the Enborne Road and – despite frantic pulling of levers and much waving of flags – couldn’t be stopped until it was firmly wedged in Kintbury High Street.

These days, thanks to modern technology, such an event is extremely unlikely. The ropes and pulleys are very much a thing of the past and the Carnival is steered along its route by the CST (Carnival Steerage Team), using state of the art digital technology, as you can see from the picture below. This rare photograph of the CST was taken during one of the team’s training runs in their steerage simulator. (For security reasons we are not allowed to show pictures of the real thing.)

We hope that you find these glimpses behind the scenes of Newbury Carnival interesting and look forward to seeing you at the next Newbury Carnival which is scheduled for 2013.