London Zine Symposium 2007

Review from Last Hours

"Below are photos from the quite frankly incredible London Zine Symposium 2007. Hundreds (thousands?) of fanzines, and hundreds of eager zinesters trading, buying, eating and taking part in workshops. There was also an entertaining scavenger hunt, a zine quiz (which was too hard for everyone except me!), and a zine mapping project that half worked, and worthwhile only because it allowed a baby to draw on the walls. The venue this year, the London Horse Hospital, whilst not nearly as big as either The Square social centre (2006) or The Institute for Autonomy (2005) was still awesome, and it being such a sunny day the parks and Russell Square that are nearby were used to good effect. These photos basically just show the entertainment orgy that the event was."

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We also got reviewed by The Independent on Sunday!

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THE STAPLE-GUN PRESS - from The Independent on Sunday 29/04/07
by Luiza Sauma

"A crowd of young people is hanging around a doorway in Bloomsbury. Some are squatting on the hot pavement, interviewing each other with cheap dictaphones. Inside, green-haired teenagers flick through fanzines and munch on vegan cakes, zine editors and distributors earnestly converse with buyers, constantly re-arranging their stalls. “The scavenger hunt is starting now!” someone shouts above the hubbub. Welcome to the London Zine Symposium.

Every mover, shaker and plain believer in the UK’s staple-gun press has converged at the Horse Hospital - central London’s self- appointed “chamber of pop culture” - to swap zines, eat cake and make friends. I was a music fanzine editor in the Nineties, but never did I imagine that such a wealth of material was being produced by so many bedroom journalists.

There’s a zine for everything, it seems; from the traditional comics, radical politics and punk music, to self defence and menstruation. (Indeed, I spend a good 15 minutes flicking through the genuinely excellent Adventures in Menstruation.) Some, like the quarterly Last Hours, aren’t really zines at all, just magazines that function outside the sordid world of the mainstream media.

Symposium organiser Natalie works at a charity by day, and co- edits Last Hours by night. She’s a staunch advocate of the underground press, and quite rightly too. “With zines you know it’s independent and DIY,” she says, “as opposed to larger publications, where so much of it revolves around advertisement revenues and massive corporate involvement…” The symposium was inspired by a similar event in Portland, Oregon: “One of the problems with doing a zine is that it can sometimes be a bit insular… We thought it would be a really good way to try to bring people together, meet other zinesters and help strengthen that community.”

It’s not all about zines, though: there are self-defence and book-binding workshops, discussions, quizzes, mixtape swaps (yes, tapes do still exist) and even legal advice. Just when I thought indie had gone overground, here comes the London Zine Symposium to show me that the entrepreneurial spirit of DIY culture lives on. The kids, it seems, are all right."

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Here's my take on the photos, including the 'Zinesters Legal Aid' clinic I ran in the nearby park: not only was it a chance to feel the grassroots beneath our feet, but an opportunity to discuss MySpace's position on third-party money-making on their site, University 'ownership' of Student IP, and urge one zinester to go ahead with a zine critically appropriating throwaway comments from trashy rags like Heat.