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Did you know that Notting Hill isn’t London’s only carnival? In fact, east London has been hosting its own Afro-Caribbean parade since the 1970s. But the future of the Hackney Carnival is in jeopardy, as funding for the biennial event has been slashed for the ‘foreseeable future’, Hackney Citizen has reported.
Hackney Carnival was last put on in 2024, but prior to that the event wasn’t hosted for five years thanks to Covid, the death of the Queen in 2022 and budget cuts in 2023: in 2023 Hackney Council decided the carnival would be hosted once every two years, instead of annually, to save money.
Now, there’s a chance there might never be another Hackney Carnival, as Hackney Council has decided to withdraw funding for the parade amid budget cuts. The council announced that £500,000 previously earmarked to go towards the carnival would be axed.
In a Town Hall meeting on February 10, Hackney’s culture chief, councillor Chris Kennedy said the borough needed to ‘ensure frontline services and the needs of Hackney’s most vulnerable residents are put first’.
He said: ‘We know how much carnival means to so many people in Hackney. However, as a fully council-funded event, we sadly cannot commit the significant investment that it requires in our budget for future years at a time when vital services are severely stretched.’
However, Kennedy said the council would aim to ‘help all our carnival groups as far as possible to have a carnival of some fashion in the future’.
Groups involved in organising the carnival suggested that future iterations of the event could be funded by a trust model similar to that of Notting Hill, where the parade would be funded by the council, donations and grants.
Previously known as the ‘last lap’ of Notting Hill Carnival, Hackney is London’s second bigges carnival, with more than 100,000 attendees in 2019.
Hackney Council was contacted for comment.
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