I've spent the weekend in London primarily to go to Animeleague Club London (ALCL) that took place on the 14th November. With the loss of the London Anime Club, Animeleague has stepped in to fill the gap and put on it's own spin on the idea of a club. Animeleague does a number of other events, ranging from small meetups of members across the country to an annual convention, Alcon, that takes place in Leicester. With Animeleague Club London, the idea seems to be to take the atmosphere and events of a convention and shrink it down into a one day club.

ALCL took place at the America Square Slug & Lettuce, a stone's throw away from Tower Hill underground station. It appears to be a fairly quiet area of London at the weekend and not too hard to get to - unless you're affected by any of the tube closures going on at the moment. The venue itself is well sized for a club with a comfortable feel to it.

There were a number of different areas set up along with associated activities. Video gaming occupied the area towards the front of the first room, with a chillout area and Artist's Alley straddeling the main bar. At the back of the first room was the area for panels, such as Akemi Solloway's Japanese lessons. There was also an additional room which housed anime screenings and the ever-popular dealer's room, which made way later on to become the dance floor.

There were a variety of different consoles on offer in the video gaming section. This area was really popular and was quite difficult to move around most of the day - seats were really close together so there wasn't much room for passageway. I didn't do any gaming apart from Street Fighter, which really showed up how little I game these days!

The Artist's Alley was a good place to chill out, with paper and pencils available to draw. It's always great to see some good quality work at these events - there's some real talent out there. Just a shame I forgot to collect mine and my girlfriend's work, as we'd both done variations on Asuka from Evangelion.

The panels area didn't get visited much by myself - I was kept occupied by the other sections, such as the dealer's room! I managed to get in the queue for the dealers room at a decent opportunity, as some people were queuing for about 40 minutes to get in. The area for dealers was relatively small compared to other events I've been to. This isn't a fault of the club, as there's only a limited space in the Slug & Lettuce. Still, there was a reasonable variety of different things on offer from familiar dealers, from DVDs to manga to figures. It'd be nice to see different dealers at future ALCLs - perhaps they could rotate attendance between themselves.

There were a few anime screenings on - wasn't sure of some of what I watched (a baseball show) but Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler) piqued our interest and will make it onto my growing 'to watch' list. The area also provided an ideal place to crash out for a bit whilst we regained our energy.

Attendance was really good and it's brilliant to see a decent turnout for a brand new event. There were much more people around for the first half of the event, from noon until about 6pm. After that, people seemed to thin out. It's hard to pin it down to a single factor but I suspect tiredness, lack of funds (after spending in the dealers room!), being in the same space for a long period of time and a lack of special events later on possibly resulted in this. We still partied on to the end - somebody had to provide the life and the soul of the party! We did have a small but good group of people right to the end.

So, what could be improved? There were a few hiccups along the way: televisions were late arriving (through no fault of ALCL), a few events dropped off the programme such as the DDR tournament and P*ss Artist (both of which I was looking forward to), there didn't seem to be enough power leads to run everything at the same time and problems with the audio later on meant the music wasn't as great as it could have been.

Hopefully ALCL improve these things for the next time it runs. It might also be prudent to promote it as two different events from the start - a club that runs during the afternoon and a party that runs during the evening. It could hopefully attract the two different clientles needed to get the best attendance for both parts.

So is it worth going to in future? If you don't live too far from London then it's certainly worth a try if you haven't gone already - anime events are always fun and it's great to talk to new peope, which is why I'm addicted to them. Those coming from further afield however might be better off saving their money for Alcon - which has a similar atmosphere in a much larger space over more days and the bonus of accommodation to crash at right on campus.

Finally, apologies for the lack of pictures - I was so distracted during the event that it didn't cross my mind! If anybody has pictures that they'd be willing to have put up here, I'll collate them all into a single post and include a link to your website. You can get in touch via Twitter or my Facebook.