Poetry on the Underground.

Back in 1986 an American living in London Judith Chernaik had a simple idea while riding on the London underground. Why not convert the often empty advertising space above passenger’s heads into a simple celebration of the poetry that has underscored English life and literature for a thousand years or more?


Since then ‘Poems on the Underground’ has inspired similar ventures around the world: in Dublin, Adelaide, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, Sydney, Barcelona, Athens, Moscow, St Petersburg and most recently Shanghai. The UK Poems on the Underground have also been displayed in the subway systems of Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm and Vienna. Themes have included European Poetry, Young Poems on the Underground, Commonwealth Poetry, Chinese Poetry, African Poetry and 1,000 Years of Poetry.

Some poems are famous, some are new, some quite irreverent.

From time to time they are collected together in book form.


Who better to start with than T.S.Eliot?

Preludes I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.