The Licensing Act 1921 amended the law on the sale and supply of intoxicating liquor after the First World War. It carried forward parts of the wartime settlement into peacetime administration. Britain did not choose prohibition, but it kept a more regulated pub culture.

The Licensing Act of 1921 revised post-war alcohol law, belonging to the world of restraint, grief, and altered habits encountered by interwar writers. It helps explain why poems and novels of the 1920s often treat pubs as places of damaged fellowship rather than carefree release, reflecting the complexities of social change.