London Transport posters from the Second World War to the 1980s

In the years after the Second World War, London Transport (LT) was carrying more passengers than ever before and there was no pressing need to encourage greater use of the system. Frank Pick’s pre-war tradition of pictorial posters continued, with the commissioning of a range of interesting artists and graphic designers. But far fewer posters were commissioned and by the 1970s individual artists began to be replaced by advertising agencies. This was against a backdrop of increased television and radio advertising and LT increasingly viewing crafted pictorial posters as more of a luxury than a necessity. 

Harold Hutchison, LT’s Publicity Officer from 1947 to 1966, saw posters as ‘London Transport’s information window’ and so revived Frank Pick’s approach to pictorial posters. He introduced the pair poster, where one poster was devoted to artwork, allowing the artist greater freedom, while the second alongside allowed LT copywriters to expand on a topic. This Misha Black and John Barker design from 1947, incorporating the roundel that had become such a symbol of LT, was one of the first of these pair posters. 

Designs had been produced as two halves before the Second World War, although they had been predominantly image based. Hutchison standardised the format and positioned examples on prime sites such as Underground station entrances. The idea was to attract the viewer with large, uncluttered artwork and then offer extensive information for anyone waiting for a bus or train. As in the interwar years, both established artists and new designers were commissioned. This pair poster by John Minton, an up-and-coming artist and book illustrator in the 1940s and 50s, was his sole design for London Transport.  

In the 1950s more direct advertising media were beginning to overshadow poster publicity. The annual number of LT poster commissions dropped to seven or eight, from an interwar high of 40 per year. Despite the reduction in scale, a wide array of artists and designers of the day were commissioned to ensure quality. These included established artists like Edward Bawden, who had produced his first poster for the Underground in the 1920s. 

As had been the case in the Frank Pick era, women designers were well represented. Enid Marx, the multi-talented designer well known for her patterned textiles and prints, produced this poster in 1965. It was one of many single sheet format posters designed for LT that incorporated artfully worded text at the bottom. Sheila Robinson, part of an artistic community in Essex that included Edward Bawden, completed several LT posters, including this pair poster. 

Some of the designers who produced posters in this period were established graphic designers with longstanding relationships with LT. Tom Eckersley marked fifty years of design work with LT in 1985, his work often featuring bold use of flat colour, including the use of collage and paper cut-outs. His designs echoed Frank Pick’s principles of legibility and clear messaging. 

Abram Games was another giant of mid-twentieth century poster design who was prolific for LT in the decades after the Second World War. This London Zoo poster from 1976, his last for LT, shows his characteristically bold use of colour and form to create, by the words of his own motto, “maximum meaning minimum means”. 

Hans Unger produced over 100 designs for LT between 1950 and his death in 1975. Unger was one of a number of émigré designers who fled Nazi-threatened Europe in the 1930s and went on to be commissioned by London Transport, in his case arriving in London in 1948. Unger forged a highly distinctive style, particularly in his collaborations with mosaic artist Eberhard Schulze, with his posters often two-dimensional representations of 3D artworks. 

Alongside this continued interesting poster work came other forms of advertising as promotional media began to erode the dominant role of the poster as a publicity tool. In the 1960s and 70s, London Transport also battled with financial difficulties, staff shortages, service unreliability and a decline in passenger numbers.  

Art poster publicity came to be regarded as more of a luxury. In the 1920s, the Underground had issued a new design almost every week. By the late 1970s this had fallen to only a relative handful of direct commissions to artists each year. This also reflected LT’s move away from a ‘soft sell’ approach to one with direct and measurable results. 

Instead, from the 1970s most London Transport advertising work was contracted out to agencies, who often tended to use photographic images for posters. ‘Fly the Tube’, from 1977, is typical of this approach, using photography and clear messaging to emphasise direct Tube links to Heathrow airport. It was prominent and effective, but a far cry from the beauty of interwar golden age posters. 

By the 1980s nearly all LT advertisement work was conducted through agencies. Posters, which were predominantly photographic, only formed a minor part of LT’s marketing strategy. This 1984 example is typical, emphasising the reliability and convenience of the Tube. Financial and creative resources were ploughed into TV advertising, which was thought to be more modern and meaningful. However, posters born of the age of agencies varied dramatically in quality and artistic merit.