As London prepares for Notting Hill Carnival’s 60th anniversary, the fate of another homegrown parade in East London hangs in the balance after steep funding cuts. Will Hackney Carnival return?
From Sunday, millions of Londoners will flock to Notting Hill to watch tens of thousands of performers in glittering Mas outfits, as they strut through the streets to the calypso, soca and steelpan sounds of Carnival.
A fountainhead of pride and celebration for London’s West Indian diaspora, for 60 years the feted march has united Caribbean communities from across the city, whether from Brixton or Tottenham, Peckham or Hackney, as the streets of West London are transformed into a joyous spectacle of dance, colour and community.
As Europe’s largest street festival, Carnival’s cultural status may be unassailable. But Hackney has always wanted to do its own thing. Since the 1970s, the East London borough has been informally known as Notting Hill’s “last lap”, as residents returned from West London’s parade to carry on the celebrations down Stoke Newington High Street.
Carnival activities in some shape or form have taken place under various names: Mare De Gras, Hackney One Carnival, Carnival Roadshow and finally, Hackney Carnival, which at its height drew crowds topping 100,000 people, with more than 1,000 performers and 25 carnival groups celebrating not just Caribbean traditions but the borough’s numerous diverse communities.
“It’s the only time in the year that we get everybody out in Hackney and everybody just mixes,” says Marva Antoine, founder of performance group Tropical Isles. “It doesn’t matter what colour you are, or what nationality: it’s just a day of celebration and just being out there.”
But all of that stuttered during the post-Covid period and stopped entirely in 2024, and London’s lesser known carnival still faces an uncertain future.
‘Carnival is an art form’
This year, Tropical Isles are marking their own anniversary as they head to Notting Hill for the 25th time. But for Marva, Hackney Carnival has long been the real showcase for the work that these community-led groups do all year round: from summer camps and costume design, to performing arts classes and music and DJing workshops. These ancillary activities are as much about education and opportunity as they are about performance.
“We try to use Carnival as a stepping stone to the creative industries, but it’s still not recognised as an art form. If you’re going to do ballet and you’re going to the opera house, that’s considered a worthy choice, isn’t it?” she says.
Unlike many carnival bands, as a community group for young and disadvantaged residents, Tropical Isles does not charge members commercial rates, even as taking part in Notting Hill costs the group up to £50,000 a year. The expense has forced them to sell or recycle costumes, fundraise and seek out sponsors so they can attend.
Though it began as a grassroots-led project threading together the borough’s various carnival groups, the parade in Hackney began receiving Hackney Council’s financial backing in the 1980s. The authority’s role has since evolved into something more unique. Unlike Notting Hill, which is officially managed and run by a limited company, the council has been the carnival’s main producer since 2013, commissioning performances and managing the event’s complex infrastructure.
Carnival cancelled
But as with Notting Hill, Hackney Carnival’s overheads have gradually ballooned as the event has grown in scale. The huge bulk of the parade’s £1m price tag goes towards operations: policing, road closures, traffic management and security.
The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 led to years of hiatus, and the parade’s return was deferred in 2022 after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The council later confirmed it could only support Carnival as a biennial event due to the financial strain.
But after the last carnival went ahead in 2024, the event fell victim to a slew of budget cuts last year, as the council said it needed to protect frontline services.
The Labour administration did ring-fence some funding to ensure carnival could continue in “some fashion in the future”, and the council continues to fund £150,000 in carnival activities. Plans were also floated to set up a ‘Carnival Hub’ on a council-owned site.
But the withdrawal of funding provoked the Green Party to make Carnival a political battle line, lamenting the “huge loss” to the borough as they pledged to restore Carnival in their election manifesto.
After sweeping to power in May, the Green-led council and its new Mayor Zoë Garbett have reaffirmed this commitment. A concrete solution has yet to emerge, but Garbett has promised to “explore a range of funding options to fund future carnival events, including sponsorship and crowdfunding”.
The council says it is also helping Marva and others to establish a Carnival Trust that would help this transition, diversify the event’s funding streams, such as including public grants, private trusts, and brand sponsorships.
‘We’ve got a lifetime of expertise here’
“The life force of Carnival and how it moves and breathes is different to the local authority system, but they’re like skin and bone. You can’t have one without the other,” says arts producer Frank Sweeney, who is helping to steer the budding trust.
However, the council’s historically deep investment has led to a top-down approach to commissioning and managing the event’s complex infrastructure, and has left many groups dependent on it as an institution, he says.
“The carnival groups have been existing on a small grant each year. They don’t have the capacity to just go out and make it happen for themselves.” Frank sees the money stresses as an opportunity to harness the spirit of Carnival that has helped sustain it for decades.
“There’s a university of knowledge within Hackney Carnival. We’ve got pioneers of Notting Hill here in terms of expertise. We’ve got the best here. They’ve been doing it for a lifetime,” he says.
Marva suggests financial costs could be slashed if authorities like the police offered services for the parade for free as a contribution to the community. The founders of the award-winning inclusive dance group Paracarnival, Richard and Bettina Sleeman, who are also preparing for Monday’s parade at Notting Hill, have other ideas.
“A lot of money is spent frivolously,” says Richard Selim Sleeman, who with Bettina helped to set up the group alongside Sian Vasey. He thinks a way forward would be to scrap the road closures, “consultants and sound systems”, or cut the route in half to accommodate performers like theirs who are in wheelchairs. “You have to start small,” Bettina adds.
‘We could be a model for the country’
“Our greatest model for Carnival is the Deixa Falar in Rio,” says Richard, referring to the first samba group set up in Brazil in 1928. “These were all disenfranchised people from the favelas, so they formed with no money, but just enough enthusiasm to make it happen. And you see what’s come of that: the pageantry, the art, the music, everything, came from samba. You see Rio Carnival as it is now, and it’s utterly massive.”
This Brazilian influence has been felt by many in Hackney’s Carnival community. Indeed, Frank’s entry into producing Carnival began with an exchange between Rio and UK-based performers, including Tropical Isles, who brought inspiration back from the city resulting in a Rio Carnival-inspired segment in Hackney’s 2012 parade.
Though uncertain, Hackney Carnival’s survival will be fuelled by this artistic curiosity and spirit of community, even if it has to downsize. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” Richard says. “It could be a model for the rest of the country. Easily.”
Got a story? Email josef.steen@reachplc or @jslondonldr on X.]
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