Notting Hill Carnival Strategic Review - Intelligent Space

arenas – the two key stakeholder groups identified by the public safety matrix as being most
in need of support and capacity-building in this regard.
Future Growth: The Need for Continuous Monitoring and Prediction
2.103 The Carnival Public Safety Project was successful in providing a greater understanding of
crowd behaviour, build-up and dispersal at the Notting Hill Carnival. Without doubt, it was
because of the Mayor’s strategic review and the Safety Project that some change to the
Carnival route was initiated in 2002 and this is a significant step forward from the LSE
workshops that were conducted in 1998. Although a number of changes have now been
introduced into the Carnival planning process such as the ‘Gold Task Group’, the Review
Group were in agreement with the conclusions drawn by the LSE study, namely that “the
stability that seems to arise from the incremental nature of the Carnival’s planning process
does present a severe difficulty: a lack of attention to the need to plan in strategic ways for
future developments.” 72 .
2.104 The Safety Project recommended that the Carnival stakeholders continue to monitor crowding
at Carnival by using quantitative observation surveys in future years and the Review Group
were in agreement with this. Given that visitor numbers cannot be controlled at a free and
open event such as the Notting Hill Carnival, monitoring the crowd carefully would be one of
the most useful sources of strategic information for safety planning. If attendance numbers
were to increase, as they have tended to do over the last ten years, monitoring would prepare
stakeholders for the risks associated with such higher numbers. The Review Group concluded
that the weakness of the current decision-making and planning process lay in its failure to
plan for the Carnival’s growth. In predicting the future growth of the Carnival, the Safety
Project, as a preliminary guide, offered three possible growth trends:
a) Growth at the rate experienced in the early 1990’s (high 20 per cent).
b) Growth at the same rate as the increase from 2001 to 2002 for both days of the
Carnival (medium, 15 per cent).
c) Growth at the rate of increase from 2001 to 2002 on the Carnival Monday (low, 5
per cent).
2.105 Setting aside the possibility of inclement weather and the suspension of major transport
networks, if the Carnival were to grow at an annual rate of 5 per cent per year, attendance
would reach one million visitors by 2006. Faster growth could see the Carnival becoming
larger than ever before within the next five years.
Figure (16): Growth Potential at 2001-2002 Rate of Increase
72
See footnote 47, p146.
115