As a frequent London commuter nowadays, you half expect to come across some sort of artwork on your travels.
In the ad hoc subterranean gallery spaces that are Tube station platforms, passageways and concourses, we are spoiled by Mark Wallinger's eyebrow-furrowing Labyrinths, the kinetic colour-changing bars of Alexandre da Cunha, regularly updated pocket map covers — and striking murals of hair salons hovering above the entrance of Brixton Tube station.
We have Art on the Underground to thank for this — a programme that began 25 years ago* as Platform for Art, a series of installations on the disused platform at Gloucester Road station — including Brian Griffiths' 70-metre-long exhibition Life is a Laugh, which welcomed passengers with a giant panda head.
The programme was renamed Art on the Underground in 2007, and has brought scores of free artworks to the many millions using London's transport network, in a bid to "encourage meaningful conversations between artists and the public and reflect on the history and movement of London today."
With 2025 marking 25 years since those first installations, Art on the Underground has announced a bumper year, with four major new artworks already on the horizon:
- Ahmet Öğüt's Saved by the Whale's Tail comes to Stratford Underground station on 18 March 2025 — inspired by an incident in 2020 when a train on the Rotterdam Metro overran a station located on an elevated line and a carriage, was 'saved' from plummeting off the edge by Maarten Struijs' 10-metre-high sculpture of a whale’s tail, which prevented its fall. Really looking forward to seeing this one.
- The latest pocket Tube map, launching in the spring features a cover designed by Hungarian-born American conceptual artist Agnes Denes. She's created an "electrified" rendering from her most iconic work, Map Projections, in which she reimagines the depictions of the Earth in a series of different shapes
- An audio work by Rory Pilgrim will be played along the moving walkway connecting the Northern and Jubilee lines at Waterloo station from 30 June-13 July. There's not much detail on what the sound installation will entail at this stage, but you can listen to some of the artist's existing material on Spotify.
- A new mural at Brixton Tube station in November 2025, by Rudy Loewe — in the artist's trademark comic book-inspired style. It'll be the ninth artwork commissioned as part of the Brixton Mural Programme, which highlights the ways in which people gather and have gathered in Brixton.
*Although there was also an Art on the Underground campaign in the mid 1980s.
