EMELDA'S JUNCTION

"I am a prolific bikini designer," said a masquerade creative, who every year works making hundreds of custom bikini mas outfits. If you spoke to the nearly 60,000 "volunteers" who make NHC possible every year, you would quickly notice that many of them, when speaking about what it takes to put on Notting Hill Carnival, use the language of running a small business or operating within more well established global industries. Bikini mas designers understand the value of their skills and significance of what they do,  yet  little research has been done thinking about them and their highly specialized forms of design, styling  and fabrication within the ecosystem of the £50-100 billion lingerie industry, alongside global brands such as Victoria's Secret, Rihanna's Fenty, and UK based Agent Provocateur. 

 

The same is true when one speaks about the sounds of reggae and dancehall that Jamaican sound systems made famous and that proliferate at NHC. Director Leslie Palmer introduced them to NHC; billions in the world understand the Jamaican sound system as a global benchmark for sound quality. To quote Bob Marley in "Trenchtown Rock," "when the music hits, you feel no pain." Yet very little has been done to think about the dozens of sound systems — such as Channel One, Aba Shanti-I, and Rampage — and the decades of research and innovation that make each one so unique that millions, generation after generation, attend carnival just to listen to them and experience the music for those two days. We have a well developed language to understand the culture and economic ecosystem of audiophiles, one that extends to hi-fi magazines, conventions, museums, and speaker companies such as Wilson Audio and KEF. The audio industry generates upward of £10 billion;  yet little to none research or industry reporting has brought Jamaican sound systems at Notting Hill Carnival into the dialogue of the broader audio industry. We find wide ranging articles about how Jazz inspired “Listening bars” have revived bars clubs gyms but have lacked reporting on potential for “sound system” pubs. 

 

Steel Pan Orchestras face a similar problem, when one hears the word "orchestra," ideas of the Philharmonic or the London Symphony Orchestra come to mind: musicians who study  and practice their whole lives. International education systems and conservatories like Juilliard and the Royal College of Music uphold them. The two-hour nightly performances extend far beyond into institutional and economic ecosystems that expand well beyond that day. A tradition, a culture, and a set of  institutions and industries built around it come to mind. Steinway pianos come to mind — highly valued instruments that can fetch up to £2.5 million. However When speaking about Mangrove, Ebony, or the many steel pan orchestras in the UK, you hear about a different institutional reality. These artists struggle to access steel percussion instruments, or school programs that hold it in the same esteem and path to a long term career as the flute or piano.  The Steel pan percussion instrument is connected to, and born out of, the British oil and steel industries, has seen little research linking it to the potential opportunities to a reengaged British steel industry, where a failure of imagination has resulted in the near collapse of these industries in the UK.

 

Despite decades of limited investment, Notting Hill Carnival generates over £500,000,000 in economic activity during its two days. Yet the current system of governmental, cultural, and industrial policy and investment at best treats Carnival  as a matter of where money is best spent on policing and safety concerns — a burden on an already overstretched UK economy — rather than as part of the future of a country in desperate need to reinvent its economy. It is an understatement to say the UK is in urgent need of reimagination — an imagination that understands the value of NHC. 

 

We believe Carnival is more than 2 days. It can be an incubator for creative lives and global industries. That it can produce the next great filmmaker, the next great Shakespeare or Mozart. Where artists find their path and give the rise to industries we cannot yet imagine, but that a five year old going to their first carnival this year will imagine. NHC is a global brand and that, with the right strategic investments, can license its live broadcasting rights in the same way as Glastonbury or the Super Bowl. 

 

Our mission is to see Notting Hill Carnival and its makers receive the same sustained public investment that allows Shakespeare's plays to return to the stage season after season. England, while a small island, can continue to punch above its weight in global culture through NHC. It can foster new forms of balanced global partnerships with countries that celebrate carnival or carnival adjacent cultures such as India whose descendants in Trinidad help bring Trinidad carnival to life. Its stories, characters  and intellectual property could one day rival Marvel comics and expand to the next blockbuster. This is our starting point, the understanding that carnival deserves to be seen for its full potential. The fuller case —with the data, the figures, and the specific mechanisms for investment— is what we will now go and build. 

 

Working alongside Notting Hill Carnival, its volunteers, and its makers, we will develop the case for sustained investment: what it would fund, what it could return, and what it would take for government and industry to treat carnival's economy with the seriousness it deserves. 

 

We will develop frameworks such as “cultural taxes” in which profits generated from industries supported by carnival will be reinvested back into the structures of carnival. Partnering with Notting Hill Carnival, speaking with volunteers, community leaders, and others who drive carnival, we will identify the industries within carnival, place their labour in the context of larger industries, and, at times, identify new potential industries. 

 

How Did All of this start, where the money comes from and How We Will Build the Case?

 

Together, with you we are creating a platform to make the case for Carnival so that the wealth it produces remains with the people and communities that make it possible. We will create policy proposals for long-term public investment to protect Carnival’s cultural legacy and full support to the enterprises, institutions, creative workforce, and innovations that contribute to fashion, music, visual arts, entertainment, audio technology, and many other industries. Developed in a collaboration between Artist Alvaro Barrington and Matthew Phillips CEO of Carnival Village Trust, the initiative combines research, artistic interventions, public engagement, and policy development to strengthen understanding of — and long-term support for — the people, institutions, and systems that sustain Carnival. This work will be fully funded by Emelda Barrington Community Interest Trust. 

 

The intellectual foundation of the Carnival Economics  initiative 

 

One of the tools of this  multiyear initiative is the production of reports on The Public Value of Arts and Culture - Carnival Economics sitting within the applied research programme led by Professor Mariana Mazzucato at  UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose IIPP.  Carnival Economics positions Notting Hill Carnival as a major case study within that agenda: not as a one-off event, but as a year-round system of cultural, economic, and community production.  This initiative aligns with IIPP’s programme’s orientation that challenges conventional economic approaches that have long undervalued arts and culture and develop new ways to recognize culture not as a cost to be managed, but as a strategic public investment that shapes social outcomes and the direction of economic development. 

 

The project aims not only to document Carnival’s forms of public value, but to reshape the policy frameworks through which that value is understood, evaluated, and supported. 

 

It maps the ecosystem of labour, skills, supply chains,participation, and community governance through which Carnival creates value throughout the year, and uses that analysis to inform policy and funding recommendations. In doing so, it builds on the wider Public Value of Arts and Culture argument that conventional economic frameworks provide only a partial account of value, overlooking culture’s central role in shaping economic and social life.

 

The first step is simple: 

 

The legacy of Carnival calls for its makers to remain the holders of that legacy, and in which the value and opportunities it generates return to the people who make Carnival happen.

 

That is where you come in. We want you to be part of this journey. As Matthew Phillip often reminds us, Carnival belongs to the people. If Carnival Village Trust disappeared tomorrow, people would still show up, because Carnival lives through the communities, makers, artists, volunteers and generations who continue to create it. Carnival already proves the point.

 

We want this work to be accountable to you: the people who created Notting Hill Carnival, the people who make it happen today, and the people who hold a vision for its future. We need to hear from you, imagine boldly with you, and make sure your voices help steer where this work goes next.

 

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