A few years ago, as I stood making small talk at a house party with a rather posh-sounding man I’d just met, I mentioned that I was going to Notting Hill Carnival that weekend and offhandedly invited him along. “Oh god, I’d never go there,” he said, seemingly incredulous at the suggestion. “I’ve heard it’s absolutely depraved.” I quickly made my excuses and slipped away, but for a while afterwards, I couldn’t shake the interaction. Where had he got this impression, delivered so matter-of-factly and dripping with disdain, of a place he had never even been? And one so completely at odds with the Carnival I knew?

It is indicative of the mythology that surrounds Carnival: an event that millions experience as joyous, communal and entirely ordinary, but which, in the popular imagination, has somehow become synonymous with disorder, a spectre onto which wider anxieties about multiculturalism are projected.

The same headlines run the gamut each year: the annual tally of arrests and stabbings is released and pored over in a way that mass gatherings elsewhere rarely are. Videos of its worst moments are clipped and gleefully circulated by those desperate to give the impression that they represent the event rather than its exceptions. The calls to move Carnival to Hyde Park — last year backed by Nigel Farage — or sometimes simply to get rid of it altogether, grow louder. In 2025, there were 423 arrests and two stabbings among an estimated two million attendees at Carnival: an arrest rate of roughly 21 per 100,000 people. Glastonbury, which attracts around 210,000 people, recorded 31 arrests in 2025, a rate almost as much as Carnival.

Reading, Leeds and Boomtown have also recorded dozens of reported crimes, including sexual assaults, in recent years. No one would suggest these incidents should be ignored, but we do not routinely use them to make the case that these festivals are inherently culturally corrosive. Why is Carnival judged by a different standard? Is it not actually remarkable how little crime there is, proportionally, at an unticketed event attended by millions?

Having grown up in west London, I have been going to Carnival almost every year for over a decade. It has always been my favourite day of the year (they don’t call it Black Christmas for nothing). As a teenager, I remember the excitement of dressing up with my friends, watching the floats lumber down the streets, eating plantain and two-stepping with strangers. The kaleidoscope of colour and costumes, thudding soca beats, people of all ages and backgrounds gyrating their hips.

It was fun, first and foremost. But as I got older, I understood that it was also something more profound: a way of connecting with my British-Nigerian identity, and of seeing black culture not as something peripheral to London, but as one of the things that makes London what it is.

Carnival began in the 1950s as an anti-racist protest, and throughout its history, when black Britain has been confronted with hardship and grief, it has provided a place to gather, for the community to reaffirm itself in the face of adversity.

This was the case after Grenfell, and I am sure it will be again this year, as the black community mourns the tragic death of Jason Arday. There is pain here, as there so often is in the story of black Britain, but there is also extraordinary joy.

The Notting Hill of today bears little resemblance to the nascent Caribbean community of the 1950s. It is a distillation of the gentrification that has transformed so many former immigrant neighbourhoods, pushing out residents who can no longer afford the sky-high rents. Against that backdrop, the insistence that Carnival should be moved begins to look more sinister: a thinly veiled desire to rid the area of one of the last visible remnants of the black community that made it what it is. Whenever I go to Carnival now and look around at the kids dancing in the streets, strangers of all shades and creeds embracing one another, I think about that man at the party. I think about the joy he robbed himself of by deciding that Carnival was something to fear, by mistaking the mythology for the reality.