Oz magazine rises from the basement to V&A exhibition

♦In its heyday, it outraged the establishment so effectively it became the subject of the longest obscenity trial in British history.

Almost 50 years later, Oz magazine is to be brought into the mainstream.

The V&A has acquired the magazine’s archive, owned by its late editor, and will display it next year. First published in the late Sixties from a basement flat in Notting Hill Gate, in 1971 the magazine became the subject of a marathon obscenity trial thanks to an edition aimed at children and featuring a cartoon Rupert the Bear in a sexually explicit parody. Geoffrey Marsh, the director of the department of theatre and performance at the V&A, said the “magazine and eventual legal battle over Oz represented a much broader and fundamental shift in British society in the Sixties”.

Oz magazine was the subject of Britain’s longest obscenity trial