Catching a train from deep Berkshire to London Paddington, there are a few things you expect to encounter. Trainspotters, tired campers and a Great Western Railway employee hawking shortbread from a trolley. So passengers on the Monday morning service might well have been surprised to behold, boarding at Slough, troupes of young people swilling home-mixed drinks draped in the flags of various Commonwealth countries. I was not. I knew exactly where they were going. They were on their way to West London for the annual Notting Hill Carnival.
For bourgeois teenage Londoners, as I once was, the yearly trip to Notting Hill Carnival is a rite of passage. Squeezing one’s way through crowds of gyrating women, awkwardly shifting your carcass to dub reggae and eventually throwing up after a day on the Red Stripes are all par for the course on the last bank holiday weekend of the summer.
The affair is ostensibly fun and celebratory. For a week in 1966, the first instalment took place to promote local cultural unity by bringing together the then relatively recently arrived Caribbean migrant population and those on the more socially laissez-faire end of the West London set. Steel drums were pounded, children wore garish costumes and food and drink were shared. By all accounts, it was a success.
Yet long gone is the age of the ‘Notting Hill Fayre and Pageant’, and these days, between all the revelry lies a darker underbelly to what young women with names like India and Poppy affectionately call ‘carni’.
Cycling from Paddington to Notting Hill on Monday, I pulled over to speak to a copper taking a break from marshalling road traffic and the growing crowds. I asked him how he’d found it so far. He was cautiously optimistic, as ‘only’ 140 carnival-goers had been arrested the day before – the ‘family day’. But he seemed certain that the worst was yet to come. Over the course of the two days, over 400 people were arrested. A number were on suspicion of assaulting an officer, drug-related offences, suspected possession of an offensive weapon and sexual offences. There were apparently two stabbings, which according to the Met did not lead to serious injury.
While to the meek such as you and I these might seem like shocking numbers, it was a more peaceful affair than last year. While fewer were arrested over that weekend – 334 to be exact – the violence on display was primeval. There were two deaths. Cher Maximem, aged 32, was stabbed in front of her three-year-old child with a zombie knife when a fight between rival gangs broke out in front of her. She died in hospital six days later. Mussie Imnetu, a 41-year-old chef who had worked under Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing, died in hospital four days after being beaten in the street.
The opinion sections of newspapers and social media abound with proposed solutions to the problem of Carnival. Some call for an outright ban. One incandescent X user had this to say:
Every year the Notting Hill Carnival proves one thing: it’s lawless mayhem disguised as a festival of culture.
How many more thefts, attacks and rapes before our so-called leaders find the backbone to ban this disgrace once and for all?
Another proclaimed that, as a Londoner, he’s simply had enough, and that the scale of disorder at Carnival year in, year out, justifies it being outlawed.
Besides banning the thing entirely, a fix regularly suggested is relocating the event to Hyde Park. Rakib Ehsan proposed this in CapX last year. The argument goes that an area with more space – as opposed to the narrow, congested streets of Notting Hill – would be easier and safer to police.
Reading some of the coverage of this year’s Carnival, you can sympathise with people’s frustration. The event is painted by a number of commentators as a fundamentally innocent celebration of London’s multiculturalism, with the Right accused of besmirching it in their hysteria. Sky News’ arts and entertainment correspondent’s coverage of the event was case in point:
While critics have suggested it might be safer all around to shift this entire event to a location like Hyde Park, one woman tells me absolutely not. “It’s a convenient way to box off black people, so no.” And that’s the point. This is a place where community comes together.
London is largely a post-racial city where myriad communities live side-by-side and, predominantly, gel. So you can appreciate residents feeling put out when journalists make twee appeals to multiculturalism – a feature of our capital which many Londoners either actively trumpet or are simply indifferent to – in an effort to downplay the problems the city faces.
Yet I’m not convinced that either relocation or a ban would solve anything. The fact of the matter is that London should be a city in which law-abiding citizens are able to freely associate, listen to music and make merry without the state telling them that they can’t because of a violent few. Quick fixes won’t get us to this point.
To make Notting Hill Carnival a safer environment for the majority who attend in good faith requires the same sort of action that would keep the whole of London safe all year round: robust policing and sentencing. Across the city, crime is rife. Shoplifting offences rose by 54% to nearly 90,000 between 2023-2024. Between June 2015 and March 2025, the Office for National Statistics reports that instances of possession of an offensive weapon have risen by 23%, violence against the person by 40%, sexual offences up by 75% and theft from the person up by 205%.
These figures should be a source of shame for City Hall. If offenders feel emboldened to commit crime with impunity, they will continue to do so and decent Londoners, at Notting Hill Carnival or otherwise, will suffer as a result.
When he was Mayor of New York from 1994-2001, Rudy Giuliani subscribed to the ‘broken windows’ theory of policing. By cracking down on the low-level disorder that New Yorkers dealt with on a daily basis – said broken windows, petty theft, vandalism – it was believed that this would signal to other would-be brigands that their behaviour would not be tolerated and that they would be punished accordingly. Giuliani’s approach worked, and rates of relatively minor and more serious crime fell dramatically over the decade.
With a similar attitude, our city could be transformed too, and Sadiq Khan’s insistence that London is the ‘safest global city in the world’, might carry some weight. Beyond unjustly repairing our mayor’s legacy, however, it is us who would reap the benefits. Rather than allowing villains to shape our environment by banning public events, we could actually live in a city where levels of social trust are such that we can all enjoy ourselves freely.
Who knows, in years to come, future generations of carnival-goers may be able navigate the streets of Notting Hill safe in the knowledge that the greatest dangers they’ll face are tinnitus from the bass or the runs after a dodgy lamb pattie.
