Poems on the Underground turns 40

Forty years after poems first appeared on London’s Underground, the project that placed verse beside adverts and Tube maps continues

to shape the daily journeys of millions

Forty years after poems first appeared on London’s Underground, the project that placed verse beside adverts and Tube maps continues

to shape the daily journeys of millions

On a Tuesday morning in January, packed into a Victoria Line train between Oxford Circus and Green Park, most commuters keep their eyes firmly on their phones or gaze dreamily into the middle distance. Then something appears in their sightline: a poem, tucked alongside the usual ads for apps and health supplements, grabs their attention. A few heads lift. A few eyes linger. A moment later, the doors open and they are whisked back into the bustle of London’s streets.

This is Poems on the Underground in action. It’s been like this for 40 years, and the scheme marks its anniversary this year by reminding the 3 million people that make journeys on the Tube everyday that public transport need not be only about deadlines and screens.

Founded in 1986 by the American writer Judith Chernaik, the project now displays six poems, refreshed three times a year across London Underground trains, deliberately mixing classic and contemporary voices so riders encounter a range of styles and subjects during their commute. Over the decades, hundreds of poems by hundreds of poets have appeared in carriages and stations– from Shakespeare and Sappho to Wole Soyinka and Blake Morrison – collected now in a 40th-anniversary anthology of 100 Poems on the Underground.

Wrapped in a cosy scarf, Chernaik greets me into her north London kitchen on a crisp January morning, walls adorned with framed Tube posters from years past. Around the table, pamphlets and old leaflets lie like artefacts of a cultural project that has become invisible precisely because it works. As she flips through selections from earlier years, it’s clear each poem carries its own life on the move, inseparable from the daily rhythm of millions underground.

The poem has to “strike them” in that time. That’s the criterion. They aren’t chosen to be relentlessly upbeat, because “life is very complicated, and grief and struggle and despair are part of it.”

Chernaik’s voice is clear and playful. She recounts early letters from literary figures like Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin, who championed the idea, and she shows me the archive of correspondence – now held at Cambridge University – that helped convince Transport for London to give poetry a home next to Tube maps and schedules. Larkin, writing to Chernaik in 1985, compared the project to pulpit posters outside churches, a reminder that “the world of the imagination existed.”

American writer Judith Chernaik founded Poems on the Underground in 1986. Here, she reads a poem at Bank Underground station to celebrate the project’s 40th anniversary

The structure is simple: every few months, Chernaik and her co-editors – now poets Imtiaz Dharker and George Szirtes – gather to pick a fresh set of six poems that will run across Tube carriages for about three months. In recent years they have also placed selections at key stations such as Heathrow, Westminster and Aldgate East, extending the reach of the project beyond the carriages into the spaces where journeys begin and end.

In a space dominated by screens and consumer messaging, these poems demand nothing and allow for reflection, empathy, puzzlement or humour.

“People like the idea of something artistic in public space, because there’s so much advertising, which is telling you, buy this, buy it now…” Chernaik puts it. The poems “offer you something. It’s free.”