In the United Kingdom, pornography is regulated by a variety of laws, regulations, judicial processes and voluntary schemes. Pornographic material generally has to be assessed by regulators or courts to determine its legality. British censorship laws with regard to pornography have often been some of the most restrictive in Western Europe.

In 19th-century Britain Victorian erotica included French photographs, erotic prints and printed literature. As technology has advanced, pornography has taken diverse forms and become more widespread in society. In the twentieth century the production of pornographic magazines and films developed, and by the twenty-first century pornography was available by telephone, on television and via the internet.

By 2006, the UK pornography industry was estimated to be worth about  billion, compared to  billion worldwide.

Legal situation The UK has a markedly different tradition of pornography regulation from that found in most other Western countries, which legalised hardcore pornography during the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast the UK was almost the only liberal democracy not to do so and the UK's obscenity laws, such as the Obscene Publications Act 1959, remained strict by European standards. Other acts of parliament such as the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982 and the Video Recordings Act 1984 combined with the Obscene Publications Acts to set the criteria for the types of material that could be publicly accessed and distributed in any form in the UK. Together they created an effective ban on the publication and distribution, though not possession, of many types of pornography. However, this legislation was found to be difficult to enforce due to the vagueness of the legal test of material that "depraves and corrupts".

Under the Obscene Publications Act, stocks of pornographic magazines are usually confiscated on the judgement of a magistrate rather than their publishers being prosecuted in a court of law. The importation of "indecent" materials is prohibited by the 1876 Customs Consolidation Act. HM Customs and Excise impounded around 5,600 of such books and magazines in 1960, and by 1969 the figure was over 2 million items. The distribution of indecent or obscene materials by post is forbidden under the 1953 Post Office Act.

The sale of hardcore pornography remained illegal until the end of the 20th century, although the ownership of such material was not a criminal offence. Printed hardcore pornography was banned under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, while hardcore videotapes and DVDs were prohibited due to the requirement under the Video Recordings Act 1984

With regard to legislation, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (in England and Wales), the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009 (in Scotland), and the Sexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order 2008 (in Northern Ireland) each make it a criminal offence for an adult to show pornographic material to a minor (defined under all relevant legislation as a person under 16).

In addition to this, terms set out in the Video Recordings Act 1984, require that all material released in the UK on a video format, must first be classified by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), who assign their own classification model to such works. Under the Licensing Act 2003, works released in a theatrical setting must also hold a valid classification (either issued by the BBFC, or by a local council). These terms are therefore also extended to apply to pornography released either on film (i.e. theatrically), or on video.

At the beginning of the 21st century, as a result of liberalisation in BBFC policy, mainstream hardcore DVDs began to receive R18 certificates, legalising them but restricting their sale to licensed sex shops such as those in Soho in London. UK-based websites that stream video content were also made subject to these content standards. European, American and British hardcore pornographic magazines became available in sex shops and by mail order, while softcore magazines continued to be sold openly in many British newsagents.

This did not, however, result in the UK legalising all types of pornography. In the 2004–2005 fiscal year, officers of HM Revenue and Customs seized 96,783 items of pornographic media carried by people travelling into the UK. Although the UK was a member state of the European Union until 2020, it was the only EU country to prohibit private imports of adult pornography by consumers travelling from other EU countries.

Literature

In medieval England, erotic or pornographic publications were the concern of the ecclesiastical courts. After the Reformation the jurisdiction of these courts declined in favour of the Crown which licensed every printed book.

In his diary, Samuel Pepys records purchasing a copy of L'Escole des Filles, a French work printed in 1655 that is considered to be the beginning of pornography in France for solitary reading. He then burns it so that it would not be discovered by his wife; "the idle roguish book, L'escholle de filles; which I have bought in plain binding… because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it."

An early pioneer of the publication of erotic works in England was Edmund Curll (1675–1747). The conviction of Curll in 1727 for the publication of Venus in the Cloister or the Nun in her Smock under the common law offence of disturbing the peace appears to be the first conviction for obscenity in the United Kingdom, and set a legal precedent for other convictions.

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (later abridged and renamed Fanny Hill) was written in 1748 by John Cleland. It was scandalous for depicting a woman, the narrator, enjoying and even revelling in sexual acts with no dire moral or physical consequences. The text is hardly explicit as Cleland wrote the entire book using euphemisms for sex acts and body parts, employing 50 different ones just for the term penis. Cleland was arrested and briefly imprisoned but no proceedings were taken against the publishers. Fanny Hill continued to be published and is one of the most reprinted books in the English language.

In the 18th century directories of prostitutes and their services, such as Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies (1757–1795), provided both entertainment and instruction.

In the Victorian period, significant elements of sado-masochism were present in some examples of erotic fiction, perhaps reflecting the influence of the English public school, where flagellation was routinely used as a punishment.Ronald Pearsall (1969) "The Worm in the Bud: the world of Victorian sexuality", Macmillan; pp. 404-22 Erotic spanking was the subject of books such as Lady Bumtickler's Revels and Exhibition of Female Flagellants. Clandestine erotic periodicals of this age include The Pearl, The Oyster and The Boudoir. Erotic fiction at this time was often anonymous or written under a pseudonym. The centre of the trade in such material in England at this period was Holywell Street, off the Strand, London.

Publishers of erotic fiction at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century began to be subject to legal injunctions from the British authorities in order to prohibit their trade in such material. Because of this legal harassment some took to conducting business from Paris.

Olympia Press, a Paris-based publisher, launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias, published a mix of erotic fiction and avant-garde literary works. It specialized in books which could not be published (without legal action) in the English-speaking world, and correctly assumed that the French, who were unable to read the books, and were more sexually tolerant, would leave them alone.

Since the 1950s the publication of pornographic literature in England and Wales has been governed by the Obscene Publications Act 1959. The act created a new offence for publishing obscene material, but the wording of the act is famously vague, defining obscenity as material likely to "deprave and corrupt". The 1959 act was passed just as most Western countries were about to enter a new phase of sexual freedom. The scope of the legislation led to the subsequent notorious targeting of now acknowledged classics of world literature by such authors as Zola, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence plus medical textbooks by such as Havelock Ellis rather than the blatant erotica which was the original target of this law.Cyril Pearl (1955) The Girl With the Swansdown Seat; p. 270 The trial of Penguin Books over Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 failed to secure a conviction and the conviction in the 1971 trial of Oz magazine was overturned on appeal. Fanny Hill became legally available for the first time in 1970.

Purely textual pornographic texts, with no hint of libel, ceased to be brought to trial following the collapse of the Inside Linda Lovelace trial in 1976. However, in 2008, a man was unsuccessfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act (the R v Walker trial) for posting fictional written material to the Internet allegedly describing the kidnap, rape and murder of the pop group Girls Aloud.

Photography

In 1841, William Fox Talbot patented the calotype process, the first negative-positive process, making possible multiple copies. This invention permitted an almost limitless number of prints to be produced from a glass negative. Also, the reduction in exposure time made a true mass market for pornographic pictures possible. The technology was immediately employed to reproduce nude portraits, with Paris at the centre of the trade. Pornographic photographs were often produced in sets (of four, eight or twelve), and exported internationally, mainly to England and the United States. Many dealers took advantage of the postal system to send out photographic cards in plain wrappings to their subscribers. At this time, it became popular to depict nude photographs of women of exotic ethnicities, under the umbrella of science. Studies of this type can be found in the work of Eadweard Muybridge. Although he photographed both men and women, the women were often given props like market baskets and fishing poles, making the images of women thinly disguised erotica.

The first business venture of pioneering British pornographers David Sullivan and David Gold was selling soft pornography photos by mail order at the end of the 1960s.

Magazines

During the Victorian period, illegal pornographic periodicals such as The Pearl, which ran for eighteen issues between 1879 and 1880, circulated clandestinely among circles of elite urban gentlemen.Thomas J. Joudrey, "Against Communal Nostalgia: Reconstructing Sociality in the Pornographic Ballad," Victorian Poetry 54.4 (2017). At the beginning of the 20th century the invention of halftone printing led to the appearance of magazines such as Photo Bits featuring nude (often, burlesque actresses were hired as models) and semi-nude photographs on the cover and throughout; while these would now be termed softcore, they were quite shocking for the time. These publications soon either masqueraded as "art magazines" or publications celebrating the new cult of naturism. Health and Efficiency, started in the early twentieth century, was a typical UK naturist magazine.