‘Having poetry in a public space transports us, even if we don’t understand it’
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
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 marks its anniversary this year by reminding the 3 million people that make journeys on the Tube every day 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. The poem must “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 also part of it.”
The structure is simple: every few months, Chernaik and her co-editors 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 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 humor.
“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.” The approach isn’t without challenge. Very occasionally there have been complaints. Chernaik remembers them with a lightness belying the project’s seriousness. Nearly all responses, she says, are positive: letters telling of consolation found in lines read enroute to a difficult day, or debates sparked among strangers who paused mid-commute to exchange interpretations.
Malaika, 25, says she once saw a poem about a woman’s love for her newborn on her morning journey. “I’m not even a mother but it was so beautiful it was making me tear up,” she says. “When I finished reading it I looked up to see a woman with her teenage daughter also reading it, with tears in her eyes.”
Today the project has inspired similar public art initiatives around the world – from Dublin to New York to Shanghai – but its greatest impact is felt in the everyday journeys of Londoners. Though the Underground is still beset by delays, overcrowding and daily grind, a few lines of poetry can prompt riders to look up, think, feel and connect.