Notting Hill Carnival will mark its sixtieth year over the August Bank Holiday weekend after the Mayor of London stepped in with £4.66m to pay for safety improvements that organisers said they could not fund themselves. The money, announced by City Hall on 27 March, came on top of £946,300 already committed for the year, and it was the difference between the event running on 29 to 31 August and not running at all.
The Greater London Authority says the funding covers increased barriers, additional stewarding and revised crowd management plans, all of them recommended by an independent review commissioned in 2024 by carnival organisers with support from City Hall, the Metropolitan Police and the Kensington and Chelsea and Westminster councils. Part of the package also lets Notting Hill Carnival Ltd take on operational duties the Met has historically absorbed, which frees officers for core policing. The Met deployed roughly 7,000 officers on each of the two main days last year.
The scale of the thing explains the price tag. City Hall puts the carnival's contribution to the London economy at nearly £400m a year, a figure that traces back to research by JN Bank economist James Williams, commissioned by The Voice in 2024, which calculated a net direct impact of just over £396m. Organisers expect around two million people across the weekend, which makes it the largest street festival in Europe.
Ian Comfort, chair of Notting Hill Carnival Ltd, called the funding vital and pointed back to where the event started. "From its beginnings in September 1966, when Rhaune Laslett sought to bring unity to a neighbourhood marked by racial tension, poor housing and social division, Carnival has grown from a small local street party into a global cultural institution," he said.
That 1966 date is the one organisers use, though the story runs further back. Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist and journalist, staged an indoor Caribbean carnival at St Pancras Town Hall in 1959, a direct response to the Notting Hill riots of the previous year, and most historians treat the two events as a single line of descent. Six decades later the weekend sits in the British summer calendar alongside the Proms and Glastonbury, and it is no longer a London-only affair. Manchester ran its own Caribbean Carnival in Alexandra Park on 8 and 9 August this year, a free two-day programme in Moss Side.
Drinks are part of the picture, and the Caribbean influence shows in what gets poured. Rum is the obvious association, and the serves that have travelled best from the islands to a British street party are built on it, the daiquiri from Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century and the mojito which is older still. Beer is still the far bigger seller at outdoor events in Britain, and a bank holiday weekend is not going to change that, but the cocktail share of the summer has grown steadily.
The practical difficulty at any street event is that nobody measures anything. A jug of rum punch has no stated strength and the person holding the cup has no reliable way of knowing whether that is one unit or four. Boozy, the Greater Manchester canned cocktail maker, sells its Dragonfruit Mojito and Blue Daiquiri in fixed 200ml cans with the unit count printed on the tin, and publishes the full method for the Dragonfruit Mojito and the Blue Daiquiri so anyone can see exactly what goes in. Its Cocktail ABV Calculator, which now covers more than 100 recipes, does the same job for anything mixed at home.
David Baddeley, who founded Boozy, said: "Carnival is one of the few things left in this country that stops a whole city for the right reasons, and it very nearly did not happen this year. What matters on our side of it is that people know what is actually in the glass. A jug at a street party is guesswork. A can with the numbers printed on the side is not."
Carnival opens on Saturday 29 August with the Panorama steel band competition and runs through to the main parade on Bank Holiday Monday, 31 August. Route maps and timings are published by Notting Hill Carnival Ltd. Anyone planning to be there, or marking the weekend at home, can find guidance on units, pacing and the UK Chief Medical Officers' low risk drinking guidelines at drinkaware.co.uk.
