Carnival is 60. What next — and does it need a reset?

Sixty Years

Sixty years is long enough for a thing to stop being an event and start being an institution. That is the problem.

When Rhaune Laslett organised a neighbourhood fayre in 1966 and Russell Henderson's steel band walked out of the hall and down the street, nobody was managing a crowd of two million or negotiating a stewarding budget. Carnival was a response to something — to the racism of the streets around it, to the loneliness of a generation that had arrived and been told it did not belong, to the memory of Claudia Jones filling St Pancras Town Hall in 1959 in the aftermath of the riots. It was a claim on public space made by people who had been denied it.

Six decades on, the claim has been won so completely that it now looks like a logistics exercise. Carnival is worth close to £400 million a year to London's economy. It is one of the largest street festivals on earth. And every year the conversation about it narrows into the same two grooves: how many people came, and how many were arrested.

That is the vice Carnival is caught in at sixty. It is too big to ignore and too Black to be funded like the Proms. The BBC Proms are primarily funded by the BBC using money from the television licence fee, alongside revenue generated from ticket sales

The money argument

In March, Notting Hill Carnival Ltd was open about the fact that the sixtieth was not guaranteed. The Mayor's £4.66 million - on top of £946,300 already committed by City Hall - closed the gap. The money buys barriers, stewards, crowd management plans, and it lets the organisers take on work the Metropolitan Police had been carrying. It also comes with an instruction attached: develop future income so that next time the ask is smaller.

An event generating something near £400 million a year for the capital is being asked to find ways of needing less public money. No other cultural asset of that scale is asked to justify itself so persistently, or funded so late, or so provisionally. Carnival is expected to be simultaneously priceless and self-financing.

Meanwhile the safety warnings sharpen each year. The London Assembly's Police and Crime Committee has put the words "mass casualty event" into the record, citing crowd density and stewarding provision. Nobody serious disputes that the crowd has outgrown the streets. What is disputed is what follows from that.

The reset argument

Which brings us to the word itself. "Reset" is not a neutral term in this conversation. For some it means governance, succession planning, a proper year-round infrastructure, paid roles instead of thirty years of goodwill, and a Carnival that finally owns its own commercial upside instead of watching everyone else monetise it. For others it is the polite word used just before something is taken away — the route shortened, the sound systems reduced, the whole thing relocated to a park where it can be fenced, ticketed and made legible to people who were never comfortable with it in the first place.

That second argument now has a serious advocate in the room. Leroy Logan MBE — a late addition to the 4 August panel — spent thirty years in the Metropolitan Police, rose to superintendent, founded the Black Police Association and chaired it for three decades. He was played by John Boyega in "Red, White and Blue", Steve McQueen's Small Axe film about his decision to join the Met after watching officers assault his father. He is not a hostile witness. And he has argued publicly that Carnival should move to a more open space such as Hyde Park, that dense streets make policing adversarial, and that the answer to crime at Carnival is prevention and partnership rather than more boots, more powers, more technology.

Half of that is what Carnival's own leadership has been saying for years. The other half is the thing the culture has resisted hardest since the 1970s: leaving the Grove. Putting both halves in one man, on one panel, is the most interesting programming decision of the season.

Two nights, one argument

Carnival is 60. What Next? — Tuesday 4 August, 7–11pm, The Prince Bonaparte

Ansel Wong CBE — Elimu founder, former chair of the Carnival board, the man who helped bring Black History Month to Britain — takes the chair, joined by Kris Parker of KCS, Symone Williams, Anthea Hudson of Notting Hill Carnival Ltd, and Leroy Logan. The frame is five Ms — mas, movement, music, mayhem and message — and the hard question underneath: what does Carnival become when the crowds keep growing, the funding stays tight, and the culture has to survive its own success? Live calypso from Alexander D Great runs through the night. It is a designer, a mas-maker, an administrator, an elder and a former superintendent in one room. Expect disagreement.

Notting Hill Carnival: Past, Present and Future — Wednesday 26 August, 6.30–8.30pm, the Conservatory, Mason & Fifth

Three weeks later, the question goes back to first principles: who really started Carnival, and has it stayed true to its purpose? Rosita Lynch — goddaughter of Russell Henderson MBE, co-producer of Who Started It?, and co-lead of Carnival Reset — sits with Linett Kamala, who at fifteen became one of the first women to DJ a sound system at Carnival and now sits on its board, and Alexander D Great, three-time UK Calypso Monarch. With three short films. Between them they ask why an event worth nearly £400 million a year to London is still starved of funding, and what has to change to secure the next sixty years.

Does it need a reset?

Here is the honest answer, offered before either panel sits: Carnival does not need a reset. It needs a settlement.

A reset implies the thing is broken and someone external should fix it. But Carnival has not failed — it has been chronically under-resourced while succeeding beyond anyone's projections, and then blamed for the strain. Fix the funding so it is multi-year and statutory rather than announced in March with a press release. Fix the governance so the people who make mas are not permanent supplicants. Fix the infrastructure so the crowd is safe on the streets that made it, rather than solving density by exile.

That is not a reset. That is finally treating a sixty-year-old national institution like one.

Come and disagree. That is what the panels are for.

Carnival is 60. What Next? — Tuesday 4 August, 7–11pm, The Prince Bonaparte. Notting Hill Carnival: Past, Present and Future — Wednesday 26 August, 6.30–8.30pm, Mason & Fifth. Read more

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