Notting Hill Carnival Strategic Review - Intelligent Space

The Arts Council Review (2001)
3.18 In line with its practice of conducting ‘health-checks’ on organisations in receipt of its grants
administered under its funding programme, the Arts Council undertook a review of NHCT in
2001. The review was extremely timely in that it was undertaken after the publication of the
Carnival Review Group’s interim report and was designed to coincide with the ending of the
Arts Council’s three-year funding agreement with NHCT. The 2001 assessment was the first
time that NHCT had been reviewed by the arts funding system.
3.19 The Arts Council review acknowledged that NHCT had gone as far as it could within its current
organisational structure and that years of under funding had placed severe restrictions on the
organisation’s ability to plan systematically or ambitiously for its long-term future. Limited
resources meant that it struggled year on year to attract commercial sponsorship and this had
resulted in the employment of short-term survival tactics in an attempt to please a diverse
array of stakeholders, all with differing and competing interests.
Artistic Policy and Programming
3.20 In terms of programming, the Arts Council found NHCT’s artistic policy statement to be
lacking in inspiration and ‘negative and reactive in tone’ 80 . Despite this, the organisation had
been able to describe its core arts activities as being:
• the provision of an inclusive platform/environment for the expression of freedom and
creativity, i.e. facilitating the art of the Carnival, including the event management of the
pre-Carnival activities;
• the servicing and co-ordination of the Carnival disciplines; and
• the wider dissemination of the carnival arts through the implementation of a carnival
‘road show’ and the development of an educational brief.
3.21 At the time, the artistic programme was initiated by NHCT in liaison with the artistic arenas.
The Arts Council review felt that this programme and approach was predominantly reactive to
participant, audience and promoter needs rather than being proactive and that this was
possibly due to the organisation’s financial constraints and a lack of overall artistic vision. The
report concluded that insufficient artistic development had occurred during the three years of
Arts Council funding and a much more robust and proactive approach was now needed.
Further, the report stressed that the Notting Hill Carnival as an event had now grown to the
point where it ‘required artistic shaping’ 81 . Some fundamental principles were proposed:
• making Children’s Day exclusively a family day;
• introducing a J’Ouvert on the Sunday morning following the Panorama;
• designating parts of the Carnival route as being solely for participants and not for
spectators;
80
London Arts: “Review of the Notting Hill Carnival Trust” (2001), para.5.1.1, p.5
81
Para. 5.3.1, p.7
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