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The History of the London Underground Poster

© Annie Mole

The London Underground has made more creative use of poster art than any other commercial organisation in the world. It all goes back to the early 1900's. Frank Pick was Head of Publicity for the London Underground in 1908 and commissioned hundreds of posters by both popular artists and relatively unknown ones too. Man Ray, David Hockney, Edward McKnight Kauffer and Paul Nash are amongst the many artists who have produced artwork for the tube.

In 1927 after Frank Pick had been commissioning for 20 years he wrote:

"It may be supposed that their purpose is immediately directed to securing passengers. In some instances this has been the case, but in as many instances the purpose has been the establishment of goodwill and good understanding between the passengers and the companies. A transport service is continually open to criticism and much of the criticism arises from a lack of knowledge. Every passenger is a potential critic, many passengers are dynamic ones....

"Even when the purpose has been to secure passengers it has been the practice to proceed by indirect means. To create a feeling of restlessness, a distate for the immediate surroundings, to revive that desire for change, which all inherit from their barbarian ancestors."

Therefore much of early and even current London Underground posters show how far you can travel on the tube and show the wonderful places you can travel to, particularly when you are not doing your normal 9 to 5 daily commute.

Roger Fry, a leading art critic of the 1920's, was somewhat cynical about this route. He said that the Underground "build up in the public imagination an image of something almost personal - as such they begin to claim almost the loyalty and allegiance of the public they exploit. They produce in the public a non critical state of romantic enthusiasm for the line. More and more the whole thing takes on ain air of romance and unreality."

In the 1920's the Underground was regularly producing over forty posters a year, by the fifties this had reduced to only seven or eight. By 1975 only four a year were being produced by artists and designers. However, by the mid eighties "Art on the Underground" was revived, if only as a way of filling up the blank unsold advertising space on the tube. Each year about six posters were commissioned with print runs of 6,000 each. If they were popular they were reprinted in smaller sizes and sold to the general public.

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