More than two million people will soon fill the streets of west London for the Notting Hill Carnival. Yet every year, the headlines are the same: policing costs, transport disruption, attendance and, if all goes well, the economic boost to London’s hospitality and tourism sector. Those numbers miss the point.
Behind the steel bands, costumes and sound systems lies the part of Carnival that is rarely seen, let alone valued. The artist Alvaro Barrington and I are running a project called “Carnival Economics”, funded partly by his foundation, which explores how to measure and govern a carnival for the common good. Earlier this year, our joint teams spent an evening at the Yaa Centre, a Notting Hill community arts space. The conversations were not just about the costumes, music and performances millions eventually see, but also about crowd science, grant applications, community partnerships and fundraising. Carnival is produced throughout the year through skills, organisation, collaboration and collective knowledge.
Our recent research on the public value of arts and culture argues that they are not discretionary spending but strategic investments that generate social and public value. The real question, then, is not how much Carnival generates over one weekend. It is what kind of economy Carnival creates throughout the year.
The Notting Hill Carnival generates approximately £396m in economic activity over the August bank holiday weekend. Brazil’s carnivals generate an estimated $2.2bn in tourism activity during the festive period. But these economies are not bound to one event. They are year-round.
In Notting Hill, approximately one million working hours are devoted annually to producing over 15,000 costumes and preparing performances across more than 80 bands. Rio de Janeiro sustains a year-round ecosystem of costume workshops, float fabrication, music production and logistics, supported by 10,000 licensed street vendors, 30,000 municipal staff and more than 23 city departments. Most of the people who make the Notting Hill Carnival are not formally employed by it, and so even the economic activity it generates is undercounted.
This hidden activity produces more than visitor spending. It generates social value that accumulates in the long term, making it largely invisible to standard economic appraisal. Cultural participation has been associated with a lower risk of depression among older adults, while health and productivity gains associated with cultural engagement in the UK have been valued at up to £8bn a year. As Matthew Phillip, the CEO of Notting Hill Carnival Village Trust, has said: “Carnival is medicine.”
Beyond economic and social value, Carnival creates immense public value by strengthening the conditions for change. It is an example of what it means to work together to achieve collective goals. It reinforces social cohesion, shapes aspirations and builds collective capabilities and pride. Governments can also learn from carnivals. Rafaela Bastos, president of Rio’s João Goulart Foundation, says “Carnaval is hard power” – a live sandbox for dynamic public-sector capability. As the Brazilian economist Celso Furtado argued decades ago, culture is not merely a sector of development; it helps shape development itself. That is public value.
A central question runs through carnival economics: who captures the value the celebration creates? Edmilson Lopes, director of Ilê Aiyê in Salvador, north-east Brazil, told us: “Salvador’s creative economy is a black economy, yet the value does not return to the communities that make it.” The same concern is echoed in Notting Hill.
Carnival’s mas bands, costume makers, sound systems, steel-pan players and youth organisations are not merely beneficiaries of its economy. They are its producers, and they should be resourced and rewarded as such, with long-term, patient funding rather than an annual scramble for short-term grants. The institutions that hold Carnival’s money, its data and its decisions should also be accountable to those same communities.
This argument sits at the heart of my new book, The Common Good Economy. Carnival shows what an economy organised around people and planet can look like. Good growth built on the capabilities, relationships, institutions and imagination that communities create together, and on which long-term prosperity depends.
The lessons from carnival economics can be applied to government’s wider approach to arts and culture. A public-value approach recognises these different layers of value and design principles. This presents an opportunity for Andy Burnham. In his first speech as Prime Minister, Burnham promised to “help people to live well”, building a more preventative state that invests in people’s success rather than paying for failure. That ambition parallels the Brazilian idea of bem viver, or “living well”, which we have encountered in our work with Brazil’s culture minister, Margareth Menezes. Carnival demonstrates what living well can mean in practice: investing in the cultural and social infrastructure that generates health, belonging and participation before the costs of their absence are paid elsewhere.
[Further reading: Revealed: the new radicalism among young women]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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