Aborted Licence to Offend Exhibit Licenced to Offend Once More
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An exhibit curated to showcase offensive cartoons that was cancelled in May for being too offensive has a new site where the proprietors aren’t quite so milquetoast as the original forum owners turned out to be.
From Alex Farber at The Times of London:
The curator of a cancelled exhibition of political cartoons is confident that it will go ahead at another venue within weeks after being flooded with offers of help.
Licence To Offend, featuring works by 16 artists including The Times’s Morten Morland, Mac and Pugh of the Mail titles, Patrick Blower of The Daily Telegraph and Martin Rowson of The Guardian, was due to open on Thursday.
But hours before a private viewing on on Wednesday the organisers were ordered to remove them by the owner of TownSq, a co-working space in Kingston upon Thames, southwest London.
TownSq said that it had received concerns from some members about the cartoons, which feature satirical images of President Trump and Sir Keir Starmer and the tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
[Jemimah Steinfeld, chief executive of the Index on Censorship said] “Offence is an essential component of free expression but all too often we’re seeing people shying away from it. That’s bad for artists and it’s bad for freedom of expression more broadly.”
Katy Cowan at Creative Boom asks, “Have we lost our appetite for satire?”
… the show is back – with a vengeance. From 16 September until 4 October 2025, Licence to Offend takes over Colony Room Green in Soho, a bold reimagining of the legendary Colony Room Club, once the hangout of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and London’s most notorious misfits.
Curated by artist and ex-club member Darren Coffield, the exhibition rips political cartoons from the back pages of The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, Private Eye and splashes them across gallery walls. This isn’t polite commentary; it’s a confrontation. A roll call of Britain’s most fearless cartoonists – from Patrick Blower and Nicola Jennings to Martin Rowson and Morten Morland – all lining up to take shots at power. Every sketch unapologetic, every scribble a middle finger to the establishment. Politicians of every leaning are lampooned. Institutions unapologetically skewered. No subject sacred, no authority left untouched.
The Colony Room was once dubbed “one of the seediest spots in Britain”. But it was also the beating heart of bohemian London. Its walls undoubtedly witnessed decades of dissent, drunken arguments, and radical creativity. Now, Colony Room Green recreates that spirit: green-painted walls, no phones allowed, and rules that echo its infamous founder Muriel Belcher’s one commandment: don’t be boring. It’s the perfect backdrop for a show that thrives on provocation.
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