Skip page header and navigation

Introduction

In 1984, a restructure meant London Transport became a coordinating body, with London Underground and London Buses Limited acting as subsidiary operating companies. This change was reflected in the organisation’s posters. While London Buses was gradually fragmented by moves towards privatisation, London Underground looked to reinforce its corporate identity with an emphasis on high design standards. 

Art on the Underground

From 1986, London Underground revived the policy of directly commissioning artists, though not within its main advertising and publicity strategy. Instead it was launched as a separate programme of corporate fine-art sponsorship called ‘Art on the Underground’.  

This design, cleverly depicting a Tube map made up of lines from a tube of paint, was one of the first commissioned in this series and one of the most enduring. Unlike most of the commissions that were part of ‘Art on the Underground’ it was produced by a graphic designer through an agency, rather than a single fine artist. Nearly all that followed were reproductions of commissioned artworks, usually paintings, with brief copy added in template form. They were not designed as integrated posters.

At its simplest level, ‘Art on the Underground’ was a way of filling blank commercial space on the Underground. Instead of unsold poster space filled with black paper could be images that improved the environment for passengers by reproducing original artwork in poster form. This example was by established British artist and Royal Academician, Julian Trevelyan, and was one of his last completed paintings.  

The scheme generally issued six ‘art’ posters a year, consisting of two ‘easy’ subjects, two more avant-garde works and two somewhere in the middle. This range was demonstrated by these two pieces by Sandra Fisher and Howard Hodgkin, both commissioned in 1989. While some considered this akin to artistic wallpaper, ‘Art on the Underground’ helped to revive the Underground’s reputation as a patron of the arts. 

The 1990s

By the early 1990s, circumstances had changed again. London Transport Advertising, which managed commercial poster sites on the network, was privatised. Its new owners sold poster space more aggressively and successfully, with no blank spaces needing to be filled. For art-based pictorial posters to survive, they needed to be created around more specifically targeted marketing campaigns. 

With London Transport Museum the main sales outlet for LT posters, as well as the main archive and exhibitor of LT’s wider poster collection, LT’s Design team worked with the Museum to commission new poster artworks. 

A long-running ‘Simply’ series represented this new generation of pictorial Underground posters. A range of established and newly discovered artists were commissioned, with artworks reproduced as posters and leaflets and mainly depicting leisure opportunities. It was not art for art’s sake, but still harked back to Frank Pick’s ‘fitness for purpose’ mantra of the early twentieth century.   

Posters in the TfL era

In 2000, London Transport was succeeded by Transport for London (TfL), which had a much wider range of integrated modes of transport. From its creation to today, artistic and unified design standards are an important aspect of TfL’s work. Direct poster commissions to individual artists and designers are less frequent, but they remain popular. 

Paul Catherall’s ‘Four Seasons’ series, commissioned for TfL through London Transport Museum, have been used as ‘filler’ images on commercial sites across the network and have been sold through the Museum. 

Today TfL issues around 200 posters a year, but only employing an artistic approach if it is thought to be the most effective means of communicating a particular marketing message. The Boat Race poster for 2007 alluded to the imagery of classic Underground posters of the interwar golden age. 

In the TfL era, the ‘Art on the Underground’ title has re-emerged. Initially begun as ‘Platform for Art’ in 2001, a programme of art commissioning was renamed ‘Art on the Underground’ in 2007. This has primarily focused on art commissions to be displayed as original art on the network. But it has also encompassed Tube maps and posters. 

Today posters have to compete with increasing numbers of plasma screens flashing publicity material across the network. However, the printed poster seems unlikely to disappear in the near future.

Share this page