AT THE MUSEUM Policing Pornography: Obscenity and Corruption in Soho, 1950–1980

In the 1960s and 1970s, Soho was the centre of Britain’s illicit pornography trade. In the backrooms of bookshops, a business in explicit photographs, magazines and 8mm films flourished, despite the Obscene Publications Act 1959 making their sale a criminal offence.

Drawing on police investigation files and first-hand accounts, Professor Oliver Carter reveals how members of the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad operated a corrupt, informal licensing system in which pornographers paid regular bribes in exchange for protection and advance warning of raids. The arrangement depended on protection at senior levels within Scotland Yard and became embedded in the policing of obscenity.

When the corruption was exposed in 1972, officers were prosecuted and imprisoned, forcing a reckoning within Scotland Yard. The episode highlights the difficulties of enforcing a law that relied heavily on discretion and interpretation, and the unintended consequences that can follow when regulation proves unclear or inconsistent.

Our guest will be bringing the Under the Counter archive into the museum – including archival footage, interviews, legal documents, and the (edited) artefacts themselves – to animate this fascinating episode in Soho and police history.