Every season, six poems are selected to be displayed in tube carriages across London.  Read on to see which poems are on display now, and to find out more about the history of Poems on the Underground.

The latest poems can be found on our new Literature website here.

Posters are available to buy from the Poetry Society (Education) or the London Transport Museum (+44 (0)20 7379 6344 for back copies).

About Poems on the Underground

Poems on the Underground, founded in 1986, is supported by London Underground, Arts Council England and the British Council, which distributes the posters to its offices throughout the world. Poems are selected and the programme administered by the writer Judith Chernaik and poets Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert. The British Council has supported Poems on the Underground since its inception in 1986.

Poems on the Underground has been the inspiration for similar programmes around the world: in Dublin (on the DART suburban railway) and in Adelaide, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, Sydney, Barcelona, Athens, Moscow, St Petersburg and most recently Shanghai. The UK Poems on the Underground have been displayed in the subway systems of Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm and Vienna. Themes have included European Poetry, Young Poems on the Underground, Commonwealth Poetry, Chinese Poetry, African Poetry and 1,000 Years of Poetry.

The British Council partners Poems on the Underground on the delivery of the overseas Poems on the Underground projects. Some examples are: as part of the British Council Brit Lit project in Oporto, Portugal poems were translated into Portuguese and displayed as Poems on the Metro in Oporto when the metro system was launched; in Shanghai the British Council worked with the local metro and UK Poems on the Underground to arrange for poems to be displayed on the metro at its launch while at the same time the posters of the Chinese poems were distributed to UK schools.

The programme goes from strength to strength, with tube card spaces increased to 3,000, thanks to a new association with TfL's Platform for Art. Sister programmes abroad (Paris's Poemes dans le Metro, New York's Poetry in Motion, among many others) continue to flourish.