Every August Bank Holiday my neighbours in Notting Hill Gate pull down the shutters and disappear. Cornwall, Tuscany, anywhere but here. ‘You’re mad to come back for it’, they tell me. It is, of course, the Notting Hill Carnival.
Does two million people celebrating together lose its value because a few hundred are arrested? I would argue not.
I’ve been going for years. Mobile and bank card in my front jeans pocket. Earplugs, because the sound systems move your ribcage. I’ve never seen any trouble. Yes, it gets busy, yes, it’s crowded, but that’s the point. What I have seen is colour, joy and a city that remembers how to be alive. The costumes are outrageous. The food on its own is worth the trip. Strangers laugh together and the bass shakes the streets. Carnival draws every kind of Londoner, every generation, and that mix is its magic.
Yet the headlines arrive like clockwork. Violence. Crackdown. A city under siege. Then the annual numbers game. How many arrests? How many stabbings? As if the only way to measure a party is to count the handcuffs. There are calls for Carnival to be moved to Hyde Park or banned outright. But let’s debate this properly. Does two million people celebrating together lose its value because a few hundred are arrested? I would argue not.
This year’s Carnival saw 423 arrests and two stabbings among about two million attendees. An arrest rate of 21 per 100,000, a tiny fraction, with less serious violence than recent years. Glastonbury’s 31 arrests for 210,000 attendees (15 per 100,000) is comparable. Yet while a fenced field festival escapes the ‘menace’ label, Notting Hill Carnival, a vast, free street event in central London is said to be unsustainable.
It is easy to overplay Carnival’s ‘chaos’ narrative by hyping the arrests made (some from pre-existing warrants via facial recognition) while ignoring London’s broader knife crime issue. In London in 2024 there were, on average, 46 knife offences every day of the year. Two non-life-threatening stabbings in a two million-strong crowd isn’t then a unique catastrophe, but simply a reflection of London’s current challenges.
The historical record supports this calmer view. Met Police data shows that there were seven stabbings at the event in 2022 (one fatal), while there were ten in 2023 (none fatal).These are low for the size of the event and certainly don’t justify the repeated suggestion that Carnival is a lawless wasteland.
Yet the myth persists. Carnival is painted as uniquely unsafe, while other mass events are treated as national treasures. Glastonbury gets poetry. Wimbledon gets strawberries. Carnival gets a charge sheet. The double standard is obvious to anyone who has actually walked the parade route, eaten the food and danced their way through the streets.
It’s also why I keep coming back. Carnival is one of the last things London does that refuses to be curated into a lifestyle brand. No VIP Lane. No ‘premium viewing platform’. The crowd flows where the music takes it. People share food with strangers. Watching the parades is a delight. You can’t fake it. You can’t package it. For two days the city remembers what it’s about.
My neighbours will continue to flee. One came back from holiday on Monday but booked a night at the Berkeley with her children to ‘avoid the chaos’ of Carnival’s final day. They prefer Notting Hill’s quiet, curated charm to Carnival’s raw energy. But Carnival’s not for them. Carnival is for the Caribbean communities who built this neighbourhood and their children who gave London its sound and spice. And it’s for anyone who thinks a great city should be loud now and then.
The policing was superb this year. Friendly, organised, and effective. Perhaps I noticed this more because I spend much of my time in France, where the CRS riot police show up at large events with batons and shields. In Paris, the police seem genuinely to relish confrontation. Here, officers smiled, chatted, and kept things moving. Planning was tight, stewarding worked, and the whole thing felt in control without feeling controlled. We should judge Carnival in proportion. Count the joy as well as the incidents. Count the millions who come and go without a scratch. Count the small businesses who do well out of the weekend.
So yes, I’ll keep coming. And I’ll keep smiling at the headlines that try to tell me that a party I have known for years is a war zone. I believe that London needs Carnival. It needs the noise. It needs the colour. It needs the reminder that the city’s heart still beats.
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