Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies

Vol. 11, No. 3 (August 2015)

Underground Poetry and Poetry on the

Underground
Robert Crawshaw

According to Andrew Thacker, reviewer of David Welsh’s 2010 book

Underground Writing: the London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf, “It is
getting rather crowded down there in the field of what might be called
‘subterranean cultural studies’” (Thacker 1). Thacker goes on to cite a plethora
of texts which have explored the potential of The London Underground as a
vehicle for cultural analysis. Known generically since 1868 as “The Tube”
(Martin 99), The Underground has been the setting for a sub-genre of writings
and films representing an imagined space culturally conflated with the
“Underworld”, with all that this implies in terms of classical mythology,
darkness, criminality, and death (Pike 1-2). As Thacker puts it: “The
Underground is something of a social unconscious of the city, operating as the
site of fears and dreams about urban life, and many writers have taken the
quotidian experience of subterranean travel as the setting or trope for
understanding modernity itself” (Thacker 1). Surprisingly, despite this recent
upsurge of interest in the subterranean and a number of poetic references in
Welsh’s book, one topic which has not been the object of close academic study
has been the cultural position of poetry in The London Underground,
notwithstanding the central contribution of creative writers such as Baudelaire,
Blake, Apollinaire, Eliot, and other poetic voices to our current understanding of
urban space.
In the light of the generally bleak vision of the city offered by canonical
poets such as those above and what David Pike refers to as contemporary
Western culture’s “obsession with the underground” (Pike 1), it is difficult not
to consider the role of poetry in the Tube as one inspired by radicalism and
counter-culture. Pike, like many writers of fiction and 20th century film
directors, directly associates the subterranean world with the detritus of
progress which the “civilised” world strives daily to ignore: the sub-ground zero

Robert Crawshaw is Senior Lecturer in French and European Studies at Lancaster

University. A former Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz and academic ad-
visor to the European Commission, his research interests range from the pragmatics of
intercultural communication to the sociology of literature with particular reference to
migration and social change.

ISSN: 1557-2935 <http://liminalities.net/11-3/underground.pdf>

Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

of a multi-storied vertical metropolis inhabited by the untouchables who

populate waste dumps, kitchens, street-corners, and, as in Luc Besson’s film of
the same name, the subway itself. The association between The Underground
and radicalism is reinforced by the metaphorical terminology employed by the
British poetic voices of the 1960s and 70s. The tone was set by Al Alvarez in
1962 and then, more definitively, by Michael Horovitz’s celebrated anthology of
1969: Children of Albion, sub-titled Poetry of the Underground in Britain, with its
explicit emphasis on protest, aesthetic subversion, and political engagement. The
association of ideas between “grass-roots agitprop” and “The Underground” has
continued and now finds expression in the very public but no longer
subterranean space of the internet. The earlier movement, galvanised by poets
such as Ginsberg, Mitchell, and McGough, finds an echo today in the website
Deep Underground, to which members of the public are invited to submit
deliberately edgy, potentially provocative poems of their own. As it says in the
blurb on the site, “We embrace our freedom to push boundaries, challenge ideas
and engage in thought-provoking discussions.” While most of the verses on the
site lack the power of their forebears, the addition of the word “deep” suggests
that the stand-alone term “underground” has lost its radical edge. It seems that
the cultural significance of poems in the real-life setting of The London
Underground demands a more qualified interpretation than its metaphorical
connotations originally implied.
The best known example of poetry on The London Underground in recent
times is the initiative by the writers Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson, and
Cicely Herbert. At the time of writing, the project is almost thirty years old and,
despite the sad death of Gerard Benson in April 2014, it has attained the status
of a cultural phenomenon. Entitled Poems on the Underground, it was launched in
January 1986 at Aldwych Station to fulsome plaudits by the London Press and
has continued to elicit the affectionate enthusiasm of Tube travellers ever since.
At least ten editions of the poems have been produced: the first in 1991 and the
most recent in 2012, “timed to coincide with celebrations of The Tube’s 150 th
anniversary” (Benson et al. xxi). The 2012 edition’s sharply etched, crystal-clear
page layouts and Calibri font correspond to the equally elegant poster designs
by Tom Davidson which have been propagated worldwide. The idea has been
imitated in the public transport systems of cities across the world, including
Paris, Barcelona, St. Petersburg, New York, Vienna, Stockholm, Shanghai, and
Warsaw. In similar vein, the editors’ introduction refers to “live events related to
The Tube, displays, … competitions and … new English translations” of poems
in a number of foreign languages (Benson et al. xx). The idea has done more
than strike a chord. Its appeal has been global (“Judith Chernaik speaks”).

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

It seems improbable at first that the poems featured in the collections of

Poems on the Underground should be seen as “radical.” When set alongside the life
work of writers like Ginsberg and Adrian Mitchell, there is little comparison,
though poems by Mitchell and McGough are included in the widespread
selection of poems, at least one of which, according to Judith Chernaik, is a
favourite with the public (Chernaik, “Poems on the Underground: time to
celebrate”). Overall, the collection is eclectic if not catholic in taste, but it is
unlike standard anthologies in its deliberate range and diversity, both culturally
and temporally. In the first collection, the objective was “to reach a general
public with poetry that was revolutionary for its time” and to “bring pleasure”
(Benson et al. xxi). There has also been a deliberate effort to reach out to
schools (“Poems on the Underground”). Grouped thematically in universal
categories, “headings embrace the great subjects of human existence” (Benson et
al. xxii): “Love,” “War,” “Seasons,” “Exile and Loss,” “Humour” and so on, with
a number focusing specifically on London and on poetry itself, while several
poems are drawn from popular folk traditions. These sit easily beside classic
verses by such well-known names as Keats, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Donne,
Milton, Shelley, and, more recently, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, and
Jackie Kay. In the words of the editors: “We’ve held all along to the same
general principles: to support living poets, to pay tribute to the magnificent
tradition of English poetry, and to include many less famous poets who have
contributed to the richness and diversity of that tradition” (Benson et al. xxi).
The traditional appeal of the collection has not, however, safeguarded it
from censorious comment. Right-minded moralisers absurdly objected to the
inclusion of the medieval poem “I have a gentil cock,” while the London
Transport censor even took the editors to task for Jo Shapcott’s use of the word

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

“bollocks” in one of the published poems!1 At the very least, this serves as a
reminder that while the Tube may be deemed a “public space”, it is one directly
subject to official censorship and that, to the extent that Poems on the Underground
was supported financially by Transport for London, The Arts Council of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland, The Poetry Society, and The British Council, the collection has
broadly conformed to establishment principles. These sentiments are echoed by
at least one petulant blogger who claims that “It feels like you’re scared of
showing the public anything that might challenge or perturb them,” one of the
few negative reactions to the collection from amongst the twitterati.2
And yet the editor initiators, who from the outset have retained tight
control over the selection of poems to be exhibited, would certainly not regard
themselves as conformist. Their position has rather been to regard poetry as
qualitatively distinct from other forms of message. The sub-text of the editors’
introductions is that poetry is a genre apart and derives its special appeal from
its unique, even privileged status. Certainly, from the project’s earliest days, the
authors/editors of Poems on the Underground saw it as acting in counterpoint to its
environment and hence as a form of inter-textual protest more emollient than the
brutal confrontational spirit of the 1960s, but no less passionate. However, its
starting point was qualitatively different. The description of the launch event in
the editors’ introduction to the anthology of poems published in 1991 situates
itself explicitly in the discursive domain of a linguistically sensitive, culturally
educated readership. The members of the public who attended the launch of
Poems on the Underground are fancifully compared to Orpheus in search of
Eurydice (Benson et al. 13). According to the text of the 1991 editorial, the
“Ordinary signs” of The Tube—“Exit here,” “way out,” “mind the gap,” etc.—
are seen as transformed by the presence of “poets and their friends,” as if the
latter belonged to an exotic, sibylline species, capable of illuminating the
everyday by lending it higher symbolic value. As the editors put it themselves,
“… poems seemed to take on new and surprising life when they were removed
from books and set among the adverts” (Benson et al. 14). In a later article in
The Guardian, Judith Chernaik3 describes two occasions on which she officially
complained about quotations or layouts from Poems on the Underground
“plagiarised” for publicity purposes by other organisations (Nestlé and
Greenpeace). The poems may have been “among the adverts,” but the desire of the
editors was clearly that they remain generically distinct from them.
If this was radicalism it was at the soft end of the spectrum. Shock value
was not high on the agenda. Few could gainsay the pleasure of an unexpected

1
Chernaik <http://www.theguardian .com/books/2013/jan/09/poems-on-the-
underground/>
2
Stone <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/09/poems-on-the-underground/>
3
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/09/poems-on-the-underground>

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

escape from reality linked to the appreciation of a text whose primary objective
was to focus attention on “the message for its own sake” (Jakobson 372). The
quotation is from Roman Jakobson’s seminal 1960 paper “Closing Statement:
Linguistics and Poetics,” in which the great Central European linguist and
pioneer of structuralism (1896-1982) sought to identify in a single model of
communication the different functions of language. Few if any texts subscribed
to one function only. Several, for example the emphasis on speaker/author
expression (the “emotive” function) and on persuasion (the “conative” function),
would normally be embedded in the same message. One function, however,
would be “dominant.” What was special about the “poetic” function according to
Jakobson was that structural form was the overarching defining feature of the
text. Jakobson’s famous dictum was that poetry represented “the projection of
the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination”
(Jakobson 357), implying that individual words, phonological features, and
syntactic structures were deliberately chosen to form patterns which echoed
each other in an internally consistent, uniquely characteristic manner. Taken to
its logical extreme, this principle could apply to any carefully prepared written
text, but in poetry, claimed Jakobson, it was essential and lent poetic language a
special status. In the context of Poems on the Underground, the poetic function,
when dominant, stood for high culture in the raw, sans commentaire, a perfect
antidote to corporate barbarism: a healthy reminder of aesthetic value and a
spiritual distraction. This was certainly how it was seen by the editors: “The
poems provided relief, caused smiles, offered refreshment to the soul—and all in
a place where one would least expect to find anything poetic” (Benson et al. 14).
At the same time, a real effort was made to offer an eclectic appeal to different
tastes by selecting poets from different periods, including a number who were
still very much alive, and from diverse cultural backgrounds. The three initiators
were the proponents of a fundamentally humanistic tradition, representing
values which aspired to rise above politics and ideology while retaining a strong
sense of mission. The initiative has spawned other cultural events such as
workshops and public competitions and, last but not least, a huge addition to the
collection of posters which have always characterised the cultural life of The
Tube (“Culture and Heritage”).
It is perhaps in relation to the traditional deployment of posters on The
Tube and the recent web-based quality travel campaigns co-ordinated by
Transport for London that the ambivalent cultural position of Poems on the
Underground should best be understood. In setting themselves apart from the
commercialism or practicalities of The Tube, Poems on the Underground was
deliberately distancing itself from one of the main sources of creative energy
which had lent The London Underground its unique cultural character. There
has always been a tension between the grimy reality of Tube travel and the
preoccupation to link its use to high-quality architecture and design and, by

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

extension, to an aesthetically pleasurable experience. In her lively analysis of

The Underground, Emily Kearns reminds us that it was thanks to Albert
Stanley (1874-1948), appointed general manager of the Underground Electric
Railways Company of London (UERL) in 1907, and his designer Frank Pick
(1878-1941), that a deliberate effort was made to associate underground travel
with the idea of pleasure and thus effectively to save The Tube from closure
(68). The satisfaction to be derived from a trip on The Tube was not limited to
the destination or purpose of the journey, though this was its main focus. Arrival
became a metonymy for the experience of travel itself.
It is this drive on the part of successive corporate managers of The Tube to
combine advertising and aestheticism which makes the cultural position of Poems
on the underground less dialectical than might at first be supposed. Architectural
self-consciousness, text, and image have been integral components of The
London Underground since its inception, to an extent which has given The
Tube experience a cultural feel, despite its discomfort, one which is not captured
in the non-lieux of most airport lounges or cleaner, more modern subways such
as those of Copenhagen or Washington DC. It is true that London is not
exceptional in this respect. The Paris “Art Nouveau” archways, the monumental
chandeliers of St. Petersburg, the spacious girders of the U-Bahn, and the
graffiti of the New York metro have become cultural markers of their respective
environments. In the case of London, Victorian industrial flair and
entrepreneurial competition led the way. From the very start, The Tube was
seen as offering huge potential to advertisers. Hoardings crowded the facades of
the newly-built stations, a flagrant reminder, if any were needed, that the early
development of The London Underground was the outcome of private
enterprise. No doubt poetry did feature on some of the hugely varied posters.
However, there is little trace of it in the photographs of the period, unless one
regards the assonances of “Pale Ale” and “Brown Stout” as “poetic.” At one level
of course they are.
Any apparent absence of poetry on The Tube was made good, however, as
posters appeared extolling the virtues of Tube travel in order to promote its use,
a development which increased in volume and aesthetic awareness as The
Underground was extended to the suburbs in the 1920s and design became a
priority. Already on the famous poster advertising the newly established
Twopenny Tube, which opened in 1900 to run from Shepherds Bush to The
Bank, there is a clear sense that poetic language, not untinged with irony, is a
powerful feature of the message’s obvious appeal. “Take The Twopenny Tube”,
it urges the viewer, “And Avoid All Anxiety”!

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

The captions to each of a series of images which tells the would-be traveller
how to purchase and dispose of a Twopenny ticket is engagingly coherent and
full of humour. In fact, if you put the captions together, their poetic resonance
can hardly fail to raise a smile; “projection,” “verbal equivalence,” “selection,”
and “combination” were clearly at the forefront of the scriptwriter's mind!

No worry about price

2d any distance
All tickets dropped into this box
No worry about losing them
No worry about accidents
Trains every two minutes
No worry about catching them
The whole distance covered so quickly
That there’s nothing to worry about.
(qtd. in Ovenden 53)

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

More explicit still was the memorable poster designed by John Hassall in
1908, for which the rhyming slogan was the outcome of a public competition
won by a young boy:

UNDERGROUND TO ANYWHERE
CHEAPEST WAY CHEAPEST FARE

The poster features a portly lady, flanked by a diminutive, browbeaten

man, presumably her husband, asking for directions from a well-built,
confidently smiling policeman whose thumb points silently upwards towards the
map of the Tube behind. Below them, the caption reads “NO NEED TO ASK
A P’LICEMAN!” Once again, the assonance is striking and it is perhaps not too
fanciful to suggest that there is a hint of a pun in the homophony of p’lice and
please (“London Transport Poster Samples”).
Without engaging in psycho-social theory, it is difficult not to see these
cultural artefacts as indices of wider cultural tendencies. In describing the
posters from the dawn of the 20th century, Mark Ovenden tellingly remarks on
the “child-like, magical fantasy world where nothing can ever go wrong”
(Ovenden 100). In sharp contrast to the cautionary tales of the late Victorian
period, popular mimsy was a regular feature of Edwardian illustrations in the
decade immediately preceding the First World War, popularised by the
whimsical belief in fairies and the nostalgic fantasies of writers such as James
Barrie. The poem appended to the typically sentimental 1913 drawing by the
famous illustrator of children’s books, Mabel Lucie Atwell, is a bowdlerised
version of the “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme, remarkable as much for its
pedestrian vocabulary and lack of scansion as for its common cultural reference:

This is Parliament Hill

Said Jack to Jill
It’s a pleasant mound
Reached by Underground
Come up here and play
And go home the same way
(qtd. in Ovenden 101)

Similarly, though in a completely different mould, another poster from 1910

features an adapted version of the famous refrain from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s
poem The Brook (1864), instantly recognisable to every educated traveller on the
Tube:

FOR MEN MAY COME

AND MEN MAY GO.

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

BUT WE GO ON...
FOR EVER..................
(qtd. in Ovenden 103)

Apart from replacing the “I” of the original with “we” (… go on for ever),
the poster engagingly plays with the icon of a circular clock face with little trains
in groups of three arranged at even intervals around the perimeter of the circle.
The same insight into the tastes of the period applies to the finely drafted
rural posters of the 1930s by the artist Edward McKnight Kauffer. Many of
these appealed directly to the post-Georgian aspirations of the upwardly mobile
to rediscover nature by moving to the newly developed green outer suburbs of
“Metroland.” As with the Tennyson example, quotations extolling the
countryside are drawn from famous writers and poets, in this case Walton and
Milton respectively. The extracts are directly related to the images without there
being any reference to the Tube at all. It is left to the reader/viewer members of
the travelling public to make the connection between mode of transport and
destination, the deictic function (“Look!”; “that”; “this”) of the prose deliberately
giving the impression that the image corresponds to a real place to which the
commuter could have access:

Look! under that broad birch tree I

sat down when I was last this way
(Walton, qtd. in Ovenden 161)

Similarly, the post-war renaissance of the late 1950s finds expression in the
inventive imitations of Edward Lear, which appeared in The Tube in 1956-7.
What is so appealing about these examples is the dialogic interplay between the
limerick with its intrinsic overtones of scabrous subversion and the suggestive
message to the Tube traveller. The poem’s last line is omitted to be replaced by a
quirky, often handwritten continuation text in prose, informing the traveller of
the advantages offered by a particular branch of the transport system
(Glendening):

A professional poet from Sarratt

Wooed his muse in a frost-bitten garrett
When his scansion broke down
She would rush up to town
To revive her enthusiasm among the bright lights
And warm gaiety of the West End. Be inspired yourself! The
Underground runs
until after midnight on weekdays.
(Glendening, qtd. in Ovenden 225)

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

The satirical, witty tone of this series is reminiscent of the very middle-class
Punch magazine and has elements of the spirit which, at the dawn of the
explosion of satire in the early 1960s, informed the long-running revue Beyond the
Fringe (1960-67) and later Private Eye, the celebrated satirical magazine, launched
in 1961 by Peter Cook and Richard Ingram.
The awareness of design and the identification of The Tube first with
progress, then with shelter and solidarity during two World Wars, and finally
with post-war recovery stand in marked contrast to the reality of Tube travel for
the majority of London commuters in the 1960s and 70s, notwithstanding the
efforts by London Transport to upgrade and extend the system (Martin 240).
The humour which, as has been seen, periodically characterised the use of
poetry on The Tube during its early development, gave way in the 1980s and 90s
to the delivery of corporate messages. Modern commentators and historians of
The Tube such as Andrew Martin and David Welsh acknowledge that the
period between 1970 and the 1990s were the nadir of The London Underground
as a mode of urban transport, despite its extension first to Heathrow, then to
Docklands, and the refits of certain stations. According to Martin, “The
seventies was a bleak decade for The Underground” (Martin 240). Its chief
characteristics throughout that period were grime, unreliability, vulnerability to
strike action, and lack of investment promoted by the obsession with the motor
car during the Thatcher era.
The posters of the period lost their former artistic quality; they were much
less imaginative, being more directly inspired by Magritte-derived visual
quotation and direct instructional slogans which relied heavily on puns: “A
ticket every day is money down the tubes,” “A Cheap Day Tube Return saves
getting the car out,” “London Transport presents a new line in stations,” and so
on. The same directness is found in the posters of the early 1990s, mostly to do
with the long overdue investments in The Underground which were finally
taking place: “Its brightening up down under”; “We didn’t want to keep on
giving you the same old Northern Line,” “Meet your new Waterloo,” “Spruce
new Euston,” etc. A hint of the old flair re-emerges in a small series in which fine
original painting and assonant puns are artfully brought together to provide a
sense of place: “A new view by Tube”; “The new Kew by Tube”; “The
flamingoes by Tube”; “To keep The Underground clean, we’re making sweeping
changes”; “The end of the line for litter” (qtd. in Ovenden 234-58). The key
word is “new.” Yet somehow, despite the humour, the poetic function of the late
1980s and 90s lacked the spice and satirical bite of the pre-war period and the
late 1950s. Novelty in the 90s, in line with the postmodern ethos, meant
references to the past: “Going up at Southgate: 1930s style”; “London’s Grandest
Corner Shop opens its doors” (the shop being the site of the new St James’s
Park Underground Station, a vast art-deco style condominium containing

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

“Twenty shops and three smart continental coffee bars. Open now” [qtd. in
Ovenden 261]). Shopping evidently took precedence over poetry.
It is against this neo-liberal, triumphalist background, paradoxically at odds
with the physical reality of Tube travel, that the immediate success of Poems on
the Underground should be set. While the movement could hardly be described as
protest in the Ginsbergian sense, its initiators did see poetry as a counter-
discourse. Even if Poems on the Underground could be qualified on one level as
culturally escapist, the same could be said of the postmodern simulacra of the
capitalist-led, consumerist culture against which it was reacting, propagated as it
was by the profusion of explicitly commercial advertisements and the poetry of
persuasion which had previously marked the posters promoting Tube travel.
Poetry was effectively serving three masters: material wellbeing, instructions to
passengers, and cultural utopianism. Interestingly, the simultaneous presence of
all three genres is a fascinating marker of the uneasy alliance between cultural
capital, art, and collective behaviour, which are in practice all parts of the same
socioeconomic system. The difference between “then”—the late 1980s and 90s—
and “now”—2014—is that, at the time of the launch of Poems on the Underground
in 1986, “high culture” saw itself as standing in opposition to the prevailing
materialism of the time, whereas today, art, culture, and commodification are all
integral components of what is currently dubbed “the creative economy.”
At the time of writing this paper in mid-2014, the early impact of Poems on
the Underground seems to have been displaced as its influence has expanded. As
with the more populist, self-styled radicalism of its cousin
deepundergroundpoetry.com, it has migrated to major sales outlets such as The
London Transport Museum and the on-line marketplace. My own personal
experience and the comments of at least one tweeter suggest that its presence on
the Tube itself is less tangible than in the past. As s/he (the tweeter) notes, “I
just wish there were more of them. These days they seem very hard to spot”
(Chernaik, “Poems on the Underground: copycats,” Watty145, 9 Jan. 2013,
10:37am), eliciting the response “Yep, I’d like to second this. I seldom see the
poems these days. Are they less widely distributed than before?”
(OhNoNotagain, 9 Jan. 2013, 1:25pm). It is paradoxical that this should have
happened at a time when there has been a conscious effort on the part of
Transport for London to revive the integration of art, utility, culture, comment, and
commercialism which characterised the great days of The Tube. Ovenden draws
attention to the resurgence of poster design sponsored by the Platform for Art
programme launched in 2000 and since retitled Art on the Underground (Ovenden
270). Original works of art have recently been commissioned as posters and
have sold in huge numbers via the London Transport Museum and the web. As has
already been pointed out, much is made of this renewal on a variety of websites
sponsored by Transport for London. Art on the Underground, epitomised by the
recent competition won by the artist Mark Wallinger with his idea of the

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“Labyrinth,” generates enthusiastic responses from bloggers, as do installations

and recitals in selected open spaces of the passageways. If the Transport for
London websites and the claims of current government policy in 2014 are to be
believed, art should be “everywhere” (Taylor).
Yet for the everyday traveller, these cultural manifestations are conspicuous
by their absence on The Underground itself. Instead, garish commercialism
seems more dominant than ever. As The Tube’s facilities are improved, poetry,
art, and culture seem to have migrated upwards into the more celestial
marketplace of the ether. A space remains between the cultural image of The
Tube propagated virtually and the reality of The Underground as a mode of
transport which, despite the huge contemporary surge in its fabric and
architecture, continues to struggle to keep pace with the increase in London’s
population. Together with busking, licensed since 2003 and now restricted to 37
designated pitches in 25 stations (Myers 1), explicit cultural expression on the
London Underground is, despite the notable exceptions cited below, officially
mediated rather than subversively spontaneous. Paradoxically, The London
Underground is a controlled public space which allows limited scope for
unmediated popular voices to make themselves heard or seen. In this, it is—
perhaps obviously—quite distinct from certain quarters of Belfast, Mexico City,
New York, or even London itself, where the visual language of murals delivers
uncompromising messages of resistance against different forms of oppression.
Ironically perhaps, The “Underground”—if it ever was that in the context of
The London Tube—has moved overground, and even there it confronts the
depredations of the marketplace, as the notoriety of the now world-famous
radical muralist Banksy bears out: <http://www.artnet.com/artists/banksy/>.
The re-imagining of The Tube through publications, posters, and the
internet as a London legacy is part of the flurry of interest in The London
Underground as a focus for cultural, and economic, regeneration. Televised
histories such as The Tube: an Underground History and Going Underground: a Culture
Show Special have been accompanied by entrepreneurial interest in developing
new shopping malls, clubs, restaurants, and even market gardens in the space
once used by senior politicians and civil servants as a shelter during World War
II. The resulting implication is that art, culture and commodification have been
conveniently facilitated by The Tube. This is partly a by-product of the need to
justify further investment in the network at a time of acute economic stringency
as well as a reminder of the network’s 150th anniversary. It marks yet another
step in the effort to boost the image of London as a global metropolis as property
prices soar and public housing suffers another crisis as the city expands yet
again. Looking at the history of The London Underground, it seems that it was
ever thus. The Tube is now, as it always has been, a barometer of metropolitan
culture, reflecting the changing patterns of history since the mid-19th century, a
complex urban space in which daily discomfort, social disparity, human

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encounter, technological innovation, commodification, art, music, design,

authorial creativity, heritage history, and above all politics and economics are
uniquely combined.
If a more immediate relationship is sought between the travelling public and
poetic text, it is to be found in the latest Transport for London-sponsored,
poster-led instructions to passengers, whose poetry seems to have recaptured the
raw, jocular tone of their 1908 precursors. Moreover, as in 1908, the texts are
put out to public tender and are written by young aspirant poets: a different
form of poetry on The Underground whose impact is more immediate in 2014
than its more elevated precursor currently appears to be. What is impressive
about this initiative, suitably named Travel Better London, is that, despite its
corporate origins, it has created space for sparky, sharp-edged social comment
such as that by the young Irish poet Amy Mcallister, which is powerfully at one
with its context. The shock value of Mcallister’s performance poems leaves the
viewer/listener with little doubt as to their uncompromising message for the
traveller: a direct, in-your-face plea for humanity and consideration entirely
grounded in the reality of Tube travel and completely devoid of commercial
content. Equally unmistakable is the poetic quality of Mcallister’s verse: the
mesmeric irregular rhymes and rhythms and surreal metaphors which are the
hallmark of poetic brilliance in performance.
The Poems on the Underground project was never designed to be politically
challenging and rarely if ever is. Protest is absorbed, if not muffled, by a cultural
aesthetic in which quality is the determining factor, combined with the moral
and emotional appeal intrinsic to many of the poems. The popular voice of
today’s minorities does not ring through the collection, though it is there in
muted form if you look for it. Nor does original art leap off the walls of The
Tube itself, despite vociferous internet protestations to the contrary. Humour,
function, and verse, however, still do, though less and less prominently in the
face of the dominating force of digital imagery. At one level, in the best tradition
of The London Underground, poster poetry is deployed tongue in cheek to
instruct passengers on how to behave and where to go, a throwback to the
limericks of the 1950s and the ads for the Twopenny Tube. It serves as a
practical reminder that commercialism, humour, architecture, design, dirt,
human encounter, and social control remain London Underground’s most
enduring legacies – but only just.
At another level, the most recent initiatives by Transport for London have
mobilised young poetic protagonists of the highest order. Their iconoclastic
voices made public through performance and web-based recordings represent a
hybrid poetic genre which is both functional and polemical: an underground
message of immediate contemporary relevance delivered in situ and then
projected virtually to the world. As a social comment, Amy Mcallister’s message
is an angry, surreal cocktail of humour, morality, and collective critique. Its

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Robert Crawshaw Underground Poetry

drawback in terms of impact is that its living embodiment is sadly only

occasional. Live poetry on The Underground has emigrated Overground;
Orpheus’s nemesis has escaped to a more ubiquitous but less tangible space.
You-Tube has not yet re-migrated to The U-Tube, its subterranean and rightful
place of origin. Let us hope that, if and when it does, Transport for London will
have the cultural courage to dispense with brain-dead, budget-led, digital Kitsch
and give the critical voice of self-deprecating social protest the same public
presence as London Transport and The Arts Council offered to Poems on the
Underground back in 1986.

š

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my warmest thanks to Judith Chernaik for responding so

enthusiastically by telephone to my unsolicited enquiry about the background to
Poems on the Underground and for sending me clippings and related information. I
hope that I have not misrepresented the unique achievement of Judith and her
two fellow poets in enabling great poetry to be brought to the everyday attention
of travelling publics on metropolitan Underground trains all over the world. I
also wish to acknowledge the support of Trevor Wayne and the team at
Transport for London for offering me an insight into Tfl’s latest initiatives.

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