HISTORY
eroding empire was begun at the beginning of the year 2000 by a couple of volunteers who helped out at the 56a Infoshop in the Elephant & Castle area of South London.
Being part of a larger network of infoshops, social centres, squats, collectives, friends, punx and the Do It Yourself scenes all over the world, the infoshop has a regular flow of people who are new to London coming through the door and wondering what’s going on in the area. Like most infoshops, the 56a is a place where people and groups can publicise their events and display or drop off their flyers, notices, posters and the like for people to read or take away… so it ends up with an array of little bits of paper that, if put together, would represent all the different alternative/ radical events happenning in London.
So we did just that- we compiled all the info into one Free Informatin Newsheet and eroding empire was born. There was already a F.I.N. for London, but it seemed to represent the free festival/Stonehenge scene, and, in the spirit of DIY, we wanted one that represented us (see photo above).
For five years, we pumped out the newsletter… with a print run of about 666 (give or take 66). The winter of 2005 also say TOM embark on other projects and leave eroding in my hands as sole-editor. After about 6 months of this, the printed version was delegated to the dust-bin of history. At this point Eroding Empire became an online only publication.
In 2010, after 10 years of hand-editing eroding empire, I took a break and simply used eroding.org.uk as a window to view Inna’s handy Google-powered calendar that was fulfilling the same purpose as eroding. For the last 2 years submissions sent in to eroding have been re-directed to her.
In 2012, Eroding Empire was set up as it’s own non-Google/n0n-Facebook calendar. Submissions are directly administered by me and hopefully people will find it a useful tool for investigating London UK punk gigs, events and DIY culture.
-Em