Underground art - UKinfocus - British Council

Poems on the Underground

Platform for art

Selected images of past and present projects.

Platform for Art online

If you can't get to London take a virtual tube journey to see artists' work.

	Underground art

O place! O people! Manners! framed to please
All nations, customs, kindreds! languages!

Robert Herrick, 'His Return to London'

Robert Herrick’s poem is one of the hundreds that have been chosen to appear on the London tube as part of the Poems on the Underground scheme. His effusiveness might be equally appropriate to the scheme itself, which, as we will see, has gradually achieved a worldwide following.

Old but loved
At 140 years old, London Underground is the oldest underground railway system in the world. It is both reviled by Londoners as being hot, overcrowded and subject to endless engineering works, and loved as an essential part of London without which the city would cease to function. The stations themselves are a mix of antique (the Metropolitan line was built in 1865) and ultra-modern (the all-glass-and-steel Jubilee line, built at the turn of the 21st century). Mice-infested tunnels form a labyrinth under the whole vast city, and some of its closed stations have obtained an almost mythic status.

From its earliest years the Underground has married industrial usefulness with style. Henry Beck‘s tube map is a design classic, and the posters advertising places you can visit on the tube from the 1920s to the present, are an attractive record of how London has evolved. (Particularly poignant are posters from the 1920s urging transport users to enjoy meadows and fresh air in parts of London that have now long since been concreted over with urban sprawl.)

Empty spaces
Then in 1985, Judith Cherneik, an American writer living in London, approached London Underground, proposing that empty advertising spaces in the tube carriages should be filled with poems. The response was cautious but positive, and so Poems on the Underground began. Poems have been appearing in batches every 6 month ever since. They have ranged from some of the oldest poems in English, to living writers like Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy and Wendy Cope. In recent years the scheme has branched out into translations of poets for other countries, providing an appropriately cosmopolitan education for a cosmopolitan city.

Picture of A Riddle, Poems on the Underground.

Poetry appreciation
The enduring attraction lies in the contradiction between the commuters who flock the tube, travelling to 9–5 jobs in sterile offices, and the small, white square of free expression peeping out from over the heads in a cramped tube carriage. Some poems, like The Lake Isle of Innisfree seem especially poignant because of their location, whilst others like The Loch Ness Monster's Song are there to make the squashed commuter laugh. Judith Cherneik herself writes 'the idea of poetry on public transport remains somewhat far-fetched, if not preposterous – and in this may lie its appeal. We have been credited in official Government surveys with inspiring a renewal of the art and appreciation of poetry…'.

In recent years, the idea of poems on mass transport systems has spread all over the world from Australia, to Scandinavia and to the United States. A series of Poems on the Underground books have been bestsellers and helped the poems to reach an even wider audience. Meanwhile, London Underground continues to innovate artistically. It gave buskers official 'spots' on the Underground for the first time last year, instead of getting the police to move them on. And the ’Platform for Art’ scheme, which commissions non-advertising posters to appear throughout the network, has flourished in the past couple of years.

You can seek out the most recent poems anywhere on the London Underground network, or, for a more leisurely experience, read a selection online at the Transport for London site.

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