Who and/or what is the London Anime Club?

Who and/or what is the London Anime Club?
(Posted on Thursday, 2 August 2001 by Dragon)

Everything you ever wanted to know about the largest public anime society in the UK...

The History of the LAC

Where does the LAC meet?

Who's who in the LAC?

Set the "way back" machine to the 19th February 94. There was a small one-day convention held at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London. This was AUKCon. Nearly 300 people attended this convention and it was presumed to be a great success. So it got me thinking. "If this many people turned up for this convention, surely there would be a few who would be interested in small monthly meetings!". I announced at the convention that I would be putting together a club for monthly anime meetings "somewhere" in London. During Helen M's closing speech she pointed me out and suggested that if anybody else was interested that they should contact me afterwards. I was swamped. About 30 people badgered me afterwards. At the time I was a member of an Anglo-Japanese social/language society who used a function room above a pub. More to the point they owned a 42 inch big screen TV with multi-standard VCR. Perfect. I arranged with the pub owner and the society organiser the use of the function room and equipment on a monthly basis. The first meeting was scheduled for Tuesday the 12th of April 1994. Now to publicise the fact. I wrote (or phoned) the people who had left me details after AUKCon. Many assured me that they would be turning up. Since I was also very active on the Internet I posted messages about the meeting on the USENET and Compuserve. I got a few responses, but at that time the 'Net didn't have as much impact as it does now. Just one problem. Nothing to watch. I had only got commercial tapes and a few very badly done second/third/fourth/upteenth generation copies of fansubs. Nothing really suitable. So I contacted Edmund Yee of the Vancouver Animation Society. He shipped a boxful of tapes to me. Although I was a bit worried as they only arrived on the 11th. "Good," I thought. "Got the tapes, got the venue, got the publicity. Now what?" Information! I decided to put together a short simple newsletter. This list the times at which I would be showing the titles, a little bit of club info, and a list of what was due to be released from some of the commercial producers over the next few months. But I didn't have a title for the newsletter. I was really stumped on this one. I hunted through some back issues of magazines that I had lying around before I finally hit upon the answer. I wanted a name that would reflect the name of the club. And so the name Black Magic was found. The letters LAC I printed in italics to emphasise the point. So armed with 50 simple dot matrix printouts and a boxful of tapes, I headed for the Clarence, Dover Street. Just a couple of streets along from Green Park tube. I set everything up and waited. 12 people turned up to watch a combination of Miracle Girls, Gunbuster and Kimagure Orange Road. And so it went on for a while. The first few meetings were a little shaky on numbers. The first meeting had 12, the second 15, then it went down to 8 and I was wondering if it was all worth it. After all, I had to pay for the loan of the TV, and entrance fees were only £1 at the time. But after a few months it started picking up and we began to get more people turning up. At one point we were regularly getting about 30 members. This went on for quite a few number of months. The Black Magic newsletter evolved after the first meeting into a Microsoft Publisher properly formatted newsletter. The T-Shirts came along - the artwork drawn by Rumi Vyse (who also produces the Tangerine doujinshi) who joined the club after a couple of months. Another regular feature appeared. That of the Prize Draw. Having many friends in Japan they would occasionally send me small goodies. I don't normally collect such things so I decided to give them away. Things really came to a head with the appearance of the "Sailor Moon Rice Bowls". A small pink bowl that would wreak havoc everytime that it was mentioned. And it was mentioned quite a bit - I had about 10 to give away. So almost every month for a year they were around. Eventually the owners of the Clarence got fed up with us. After all we weren't making them much money with buying drinks. Anime fans are not like SF fans. We don't drink like fish. So when new owners took over the pub we were asked to leave. Now we had a problem. Where can we go? What sort of place would put up with 30-40 dodgy characters, watching unintelligible TV shows? I approached the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation to see if we could use their premises. They welcomed us with open arms. This sort of thing was right up their street, so to speak. So two years after starting the club, we moved into our new home. We changed the meetings to the Third Thursdays and First Sundays. The Sunday meetings were because many people were coming in from out of town and could get here for the Thursday meetings. We did try for a short time with Saturday meetings at the Clarence but they weren't very well attended. The Daiwa House is a grade one listed building on the Regency Park Outer Circle. It has 5 floors a huge number of rooms and is ideal for us. We started a second video room. So now each meeting had two video streams. It wasn't much longer before commercial dealers joined us as well. Otaku Publishing was the first. Closely followed by United Publications. There was a bit of rivalry between the two, but after we banned them from attending and forced them to sign a Traders Agreement we allowed them back. Any commercial dealer is now welcomed at the LAC meetings - providing they sign the agreement. As from January 1999 we have gone back to only one video room. The reason behind this is because the second room was not really getting at much attention. There were times when the room was either empty or only 1 or 2 people were watching the scheduled programmes. Also the second video room is on the same floor level as the general meeting room, and that was getting packed. With about 50-60 people turning up at each meeting we needed a bit of breathing space. The maximum number of people we have ever had at the LAC at one time was 85. And it was pretty packed. The Black Magic newsletter also underwent a few changes. Due to a computer theft all the templates for the newsletter (as well as the original website) went missing. So now the newsletter is a standard Word file, that contains club news as well as extracts of news from Jonathan Weeks' Animejin on-line fanzine. And the website was re-born into a database system based around Lotus Notes and hosted on my own computers. At the start of 2000, a new Director took over the running of the Daiwa. Instead of running the Foundation as a Charity she tried to turn it more into a business, and hence wanted to charge us around £300 per meeting. This was not something we could afford. So it was time to up roots and move again. We migrated back to a Pub. This time it was the Pontefract Castle on Wigmore Street. We took over the whole of the Cellar Bar for our meetings, although with 3 other floors in the pub many people disappeared off for a chat and/or spot of role playing. I think the fact that they sold drinks also helped, because the number of attendees rose. We used to regularly get over 100 people attending. But that just introduced further problems. We eventually outgrew the Pontefract, so once again the club was on the move. This time normal premises were a problem. So we decided that it would be better to bite the bullet and actually invest in paying for a pub to open so that we could hold a private function. So we looked around for something special. We found the ideal spot in the Hogs Head at America Square. The pub itself features two main rooms. The main room is for gathering, gossip, holds the tables for the dealers and generally is the heart of the club. But the second room is where we have the lights turned down low, and the sound turned up. There are large screen TVs placed throughout and we have anime running on them the whole time, so everybody can see what is going on. Since we have absolute control over attendance (unlike an open pub) we can offer better facilities. Because of this attendance has risen even higher. The average numbers are now around 175 a meeting, with the biggest ever attendance at our 10 year anniversary in April 2004 of 206 people. As of March 2007 the Hog's Head was refurbished and re-named to the "Slug and Lettuce". But we're still (mostly) the same inside. So where does the LAC go from here on? Well hopefully onward and upward. We have very talented artists in the club. As well as translators, subtitlers, an extensive tape and DVD library, contacts with all the major companies throughout the UK. So we are constantly getting the latest titles straight from the producers in Japan and making them available to club members. That's where the club memberships go. And who said running a society was easy? Not me. Now where's my straight jacket? David "Dragon" Cotterill.