Art on the Underground Writer in Residence 2025-2026

Thoughtism

The Art on the Underground Writer in Residence is a creative opportunity for a TfL staff member to develop their writing by working with TfL’s contemporary art programme, Art on the Underground, over a period of six months. The Writer in Residence programme aims to highlight and amplify the creative voices within TfL, creating engaging responses to Art on the Underground’s ongoing programme.  

Claire Lindsey is a stand-up comedian and incident response coordinator. During her residency, she created Thoughtism, a series of jokes inspired by everyday experiences on the TfL network. By combining her passion for public transport, spies and comedy, the project is built around the idea of layered discovery used by comedians and spies alike — the moment when a small detail gradually reveals a bigger meaning. 

Fascinated by techniques used to hide messages during the Second World War, each joke contains a word contributing to a hidden message running across the 36-poster sites at the Earl’s Court–Warwick Road walkway. Commuters might encounter a single joke in passing, or gradually notice the message as they travel. 

“My desire was to contribute something creative that brings a moment of happiness to someone’s journey. Comedy is my art form, where even a pun can contain several layers of meaning. 

I’m neurodivergent, at an interchange of autism, ADHD and dyslexia — the junction of how I experience patterns in language and everyday life. I call this being Thoughtistic, and my method is Thoughtism. It’s a playful philosophy of noticing, where a slightly different way of thinking can reveal unexpected meanings and humour already present in our everyday language, the small signals hidden in plain sight. Comedy lies within the tension of structure colliding with the unpredictability of human nature, especially on public transport. 

As an autistic stand-up, I often watch how behaviour shifts in shared spaces, the tiny negotiations over where to stand, the quiet relief when you realise you’re on the right train, and the subtle choreography of strangers moving around each other. 

Jokes often have many layers, with different people discovering different meanings within the same line. The project deliberately builds those layers, allowing a hidden message to emerge across the journey — an example of Thoughtism in action, hidden in the small gaps between the jokes, revealing the unity that was there all along.”  

– Claire Lindsey 

The project was launched with a live stand-up set by Claire in Earl’s Court station in April 2026.  

we move through scales of blue

we move through scales of blue is a series of four new large-scale artworks by artist Phoebe Boswell for the escalators at Bethnal Green and Notting Hill Gate stations, on view from March 2026.

Phoebe Boswell’s multidisciplinary practice includes, but is not limited to, painting, drawing, video, animation, sound and interactivity. Her figurative artworks explore freedom, grief, intimacy and migration through a Black feminist diasporic lens and denote a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other.

Her recent work has considered bodies of water as both repositories of painful historical experience and sites of renewal and hope. we move through scales of blue convenes these ideas, exploring water as a container for resistance, joy, remembrance and possibility.

The Tube shares its space beneath the city with a labyrinth of lost rivers and waterways. Notting Hill Gate runs close to the course of the River Westbourne and Bethnal Green to the River Walbrook. Both rivers were diverted underground in the nineteenth century paralleling the development of the Tube which diverted the flow of passengers beneath London’s surface in the same period.

we move through scales of blue traces the notion of the waterway, evoking aquatic journeys and migratory routes to, from, and within London. Guided by the hydro-feminist view that all bodies of water are connected, this new work is conceived as ‘a call to the surface’ – an invitation to a collective consciousness about the world we inhabit. This builds on Boswell’s ongoing practice of reclaiming water for Black diasporic communities, after she encountered the Black Swimming Association’s statistic that 96% of Black British adults don’t swim.

Following a call out to local swimming communities, we move through scales of blue features multi-layered photographic tableaus of Black swimmers who have made London their home, or whose families have migrated here across generations. Boswell gathered reflections from participants about their relationship with water, creating space for their stories and inviting us to consider those held within our own bodies.

Participants were photographed underwater, responding intuitively to prompts from Boswell. Utilising traditional stop-frame animation techniques, Boswell has layered still images into complex sequences which are brought to life by passengers’ movement up and down the escalators. This echoes early forms of moving image, where the illusion of movement is created through a sequence of still images. At Bethnal Green and Notting Hill Gate stations, it is both the escalator and the people travelling on it that combine to animate the work.

With we move through scales of blue, Boswell asks us to consider water as a site of endurance, migratory trauma, healing and collective agency.

With deep thanks to the participants: Adesola Adegbembo, Hannah Algahli, Titilayo Ayeni, Zahara Chaker-Jones, Norma Campbell, Topher Cambpell, Tukya Campbell, Sharon & Lillea James, Elliot Kennedy, Lewis McCormack, Buitumelo Kotekwa Mushekwa, Khadija Niang, Alanna O’Garro, Ekow Oliver, Sankara O’Garro, Hani Salih, Lorna Soar & Sarah Whyte.

2026 Programme Announcement

Since its conception in 2000, Transport for London’s Art on the Underground programme has been at the forefront of critically engaged programming that reflects on the changing nature of public space, challenging the idea that public art is fixed.

Through commissioning artists in an open examination of community, space and place, the programme has a renowned history of commissioning site specific work that brings unexpected interactions and new perspectives to millions of people travelling through London. 2026 continues that tradition with a series of commissions that explore subterranean histories, lost voices and hidden labour.

Art on the Underground’s programme for 2026 comprises major new works by five contemporary artists which will be displayed at Tube stations across London, including:

• ​​​​​​a new series of works by interdisciplinary artist Phoebe Boswell at Notting Hill and Bethnal Green stations launching March 2026

• a new artwork by Ellen Gallagher for the Summer 2026 Pocket Tube Map cover

• a new audio commission by artist, composer and DJ Ain Bailey for Waterloo station in June 2026

• a large-scale commission by Scottish painter Caroline Walker at Stratford station launching September 2026

• and a new artwork by Hurvin Anderson marking the 10th commission of the Brixton Mural Programme in November 2026

In its breadth and presence across London, the 2026 programme reflects historic imbalances and under-representation, reframing public space and bringing artworks to the city which are relevant to life today.

The Congregation

The Congregation is a new mural artwork for Brixton Underground station by artist Rudy Loewe. Launched on 20 November 2025, the work will be on view for a year.

Loewe is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, and sculpture. Their work invites and amplifies those voices suppressed by dominant retellings of history, thereby making space for different forms of knowledge. It channels the narrative energy of comics and the clarity of illustration by combining text and image with the use of vivid colour.

The Congregation honours Brixton’s history as a place of resistance and community gathering, particularly for London’s Black communities. The work features twenty scenes celebrating the figures and history of the local area. Loewe interweaves stories from archival research and interviews, visualising the rich, sensorial experience of Brixton. With The Congregation, Loewe offers an alternative entry point into Brixton as a place that has been a focal point for Black communities over the last 75 years.

Loewe’s new work for Brixton pays tribute to figures and communities which have shaped the culture of the local area, including depictions of the Windrush Generation’s arrival in Brixton in the late 1940s and SisterMatic, a Black lesbian-run sound system who have been known for offering much-needed lesbian nightlife in the area, and beyond, since the mid-1980s. Other sitters include, TfL Train Operator, CJ Rivers, depicted with their child, and activist Marcia Rigg in ‘Holding the Flame’, a virtual statue created by Aswarm in memory of her brother, Sean Rigg, who died in police custody at Brixton Police Station in 2008.

The work also features local landmarks, places and cultural spaces, such as the 121 Centre on Railton Road, one of the UK’s longest-running squats, where famously activist Olive Morris lived during the 1970s; Southwyck House, a large brutalist-style housing association development known locally as ‘Barrier Block’ for its dominating presence; and artist Pearl Alcock’s underground bar, which she ran from her flat on Railton Road as a social space for Black gay men in the 1990s.

Brixton’s activist history is honoured through the inclusion of sites such as the Frontline Off Licence on Atlantic Road, a significant landmark as the site of the first resistance during the 1981 Brixton Uprising; and the annual noise demonstration outside HM Prison Brixton, taking place every New Year’s Eve in solidarity with prisoners.

Alongside Brixton’s history of activism and community organising, Loewe highlights daily acts of intergenerational gathering, joy and care. People are depicted chatting outside The Powerful Hand, a spiritual shop, as long queues form outside Healthy Eaters, a popular Jamaican restaurant. Teenage girls walk through the streets as women shop with young children at the market on Electric Avenue, and older men meet and chat in Windrush Square.

The Congregation visualises the rich social and political history of the local area and the intertwined stories of its people and communities, which have made and continue to make Brixton a place of gathering, connection and collective resistance, particularly for Black communities.

Go Find Miracles

Go Find Miracles was a new sound artwork by 2023 Turner Prize-nominated artist Rory Pilgrim for Waterloo station commissioned by Art on the Underground.

This new work emerged from Pilgrim’s long-term work with those affected by the criminal justice system. Recorded in two underground locations, with Go Find Miracles, Pilgrim asked how we go beneath the surface to imagine new structures of repair and possibility.

The work was developed in collaboration with HMP/YOI Portland and the Prison Choir Project, as well as the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR) and the Feminist Library in Peckham. Go Find Miracles could be heard at Waterloo Underground station along the travelator connecting the Northern and Jubilee lines, between 14-25 July 2025.

Rory Pilgrim works collaboratively and in dialogue with others, across music composition, performance, film, drawing and text, reflecting and redefining how we come together to shape social change.

Go Find Miracles focused on the role that the Isle of Portland, a small island in the English Channel, has played in shaping London through its quarries. Portland stone has been used to build many of London’s most iconic buildings, including the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, TfL’s historic headquarters – 55 Broadway, and Waterloo station itself. Trains to and from Portland’s closest station, Weymouth, arrive and depart from Waterloo – which acts as a gateway to the island, whose resources have built so much of the capital.

The Isle of Portland is also the site of two prisons, including HMP/YOI Portland, and the former site of prison barge HMP Weare and the Bibby Stockholm which temporarily housed asylum seekers. The labour of the people imprisoned on the island has historically shaped its landscape, with the many stone quarries originally being worked by imprisoned people who were initially brought to Portland in 1848 to construct the 2.84-mile-long harbour breakwater.

Expanding from Pilgrim’s long-term collaboration with communities on Portland and developed following a workshop at The Feminist Library in London, which used collections of intersectional feminist literature from the 1970s until the present day, Go Find Miracles explored the ways that the law impacts our lives and our environment. Reflecting on the idea of a miracle as an opening for change and a prayer as a sequence of connection through the words we share with each other, the artwork was structured around a call and response prayer.

Go Find Miracles was recorded underground in a Portland stone quarry, amongst the layers in which deep time connects us with our modern world, and on the disused Jubilee line platform at Charing Cross London Underground station: bringing voices from Portland and London together.

The sound work took the form of a conversation, spoken reflections and poetry by Carina Murray and Holly Upton were accompanied by music composed by Pilgrim and sung by soloist Robyn Haddon, alumni of the Prison Choir Project, and a further choir of singers with whom Pilgrim has previously collaborated for projects including pink & green, 2024 and RAFTS, 2022. The lyrics and melodies of the work were partly written together with men from HMP/YOI Portland.

Constituting a prayer of call and response that ultimately traces a 10-minute loop without end, Go Find Miracles asked, if we break the loop, is it here we find space for miracles?

Go Find Miracles could be heard alongside visual artworks by Pilgrim depicting songbirds carrying messages between London and Portland. These drawings were installed throughout Waterloo Underground station making visible the listening experience and the ripple of connection between the two places explored in the work.

An expanded leaflet documenting the development of Go Find Miracles was available to collect from the station. A short film by 2025 Jarman award nominees, Other Cinemas, about the making of Go Find Miracles, is available to view here.

Go Find Miracles is the third audio commission developed in collaboration with The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Space’s at Risk programme (CCSaR) to spotlight and amplify grassroots organisations they have supported, and produce audio installations that can be heard across London Underground stations.

Credits

Collaborators: The Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk team, The Feminist Library, HMP/YOI Portland, Learners from HMP/YOI Portland & The Prison Choir Project

Design: Wolfe Hall

Production & facilitation: Elizabeth Graham & Rory Pilgrim

Composition: Rory Pilgrim

Speakers: Carina Murray & Holly Upton

Sound recording & mixing: Lucas August

Sound editing: Nada Smiljanic

Singers: Adam Green, Darren, George Chron, Marcello, Robyn Haddon, Todd Harris, Seraphina D’Arby and Marged Siôn

TfL Colleagues: Fernando Soler & Lota Anyakora

Recorded in an Albion Stone Ltd Portland stone mine on the Isle of Dorset, The Crypt Studio and on the disused Jubilee line platform at Charing Cross Underground station.

Map Projections

An artwork by Agnes Denes, a leading pioneer of the environmental art movement, features on the cover of the 41^st Pocket Tube map, which launched on 12 June 2025 on posters across the city. Commissioned by Art on the Underground in the organisation’s 25th anniversary year, the 41st Tube Map Cover continues Denes’s exploration of environmental and social issues and the challenges of global survival.

Denes’s Map Projections is a digital drawing that presents an alternate perception of space and time by projecting a section of the globe onto a cube rather than a sphere. It renders a 3D form into a 2D artwork by a process called isometric projection, often used in technical sketches, and references Denes’s renowned 1970s series, Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space – Map Projections, which took the familiar form of the globe and distorted it into different shapes, including The Hotdog, The Pyramid and The Snail. The outline of the continents in the current and previous works precisely follow this distortion.

The new form of the globe is an “electrified” rendering, with glowing lines illuminated against a pitch-black background. This transformation of the globe into a distorted, electrified form is similar to the way that the Tube map turns the London transport network into a navigable diagram.

Throughout her career, Denes’s scientifically-based drawings, prints and architectural designs have combined science, mathematics, philosophy and environmentalism. Her pioneering environmental art, including Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982), a two-acre field of wheat planted and harvested in downtown Manhattan, New York, is one of many monumental works that have drawn attention to global ecological disaster and demonstrate Denes’s role in transforming the Land Art movement towards social action.

Map Projections will be printed on the cover of pocket Tube maps from early July. The maps will be available for free at all TfL stations, and a poster with the design is now displayed across the network, offering a preview.

Art on the Underground Staff Writer in Residence 2023 at St James's Park

‘Ode to the Mother’ is the second release from the Art on the Underground Writer in Residence Anthony Okolie. Inspired by ‘Rebirth of a Nation’ an artwork currently on display at Brixton Underground station until winter 2024 by artist Jem Perucchini.

‘Ode to the Mother’ will be installed on the platform of St James’s Park Underground Station as an artwork poster, launching February 22nd 2024 and on view for one year.

The Art on the Underground Writer in Residence is a creative opportunity for a TfL staff member to develop their writing by working with TfL’s contemporary art programme Art on the Underground over a period of six months.

The Writer in Residence programme aims to highlight and amplify the creative voices within TfL, creating engaging responses to Art on the Underground’s ongoing programme.

ODE TO THE MOTHER

Saviour Her Equality/Her Equality Ruler,

All hail the almighty creator,

The homemaker,

Hence why, ‘Mother Nature’,

The law of attraction creates infinite life,

Divine feminine, named as the wife,

Unlimited wisdom as a matter of fact,

She can stroke my ego all the way back,

Her sweet voice sings away the blues,

Size 5 but that isn’t why you couldn’t walk in her shoes,

On long wintry mornings, her will never fails,

Through the darkest summers, she somehow prevails,

The cool breeze tempts the leaves,

Tall black trees, rooted in glory,

Bloody cycles of pain she endures to alibi his story,

A happy bereavement deep within.

She raises men,

Soft and cuddly, foremost point of reference,

Incomparable, she can’t be venerated by a single sentence,

Not to mention, walking in the snow,

Looking at the stars to know, we’re connected via soul,

For unforgettable memories, I’m Nat King Cole,

You give me the sense to have it all.

Anthony Okolie – Art on the Underground Staff Writer in Residence

Saved by the Whale's Tail, Saved by Art

2025 Programme Announcement

Art on the Underground’s programme for 2025 comprises major new works from four contemporary artists. Since its conception in 2000, Art on the Underground has been at the forefront of critically engaged programming that reflects on the changing nature of public space, challenging the idea that public art is fixed.  

Through placing trust in artists and the creative process, the programme has a renowned history of commissioning site specific work that speaks to people, places, and histories. 2025 continues that tradition with a series of commissions that allow for meaningful and expansive conversations between artists and the public. 2025 will see a large-scale collaborative artwork by Ahmet Öğüt at Stratford station in collaboration with New Contemporaries, a new audio commission by Rory Pilgrim for millions of commuters at Waterloo station, and a new painting by Rudy Loewe at Brixton Underground station, continuing its series of commissions that respond to the rich history of murals in the area from the 1980s, and the wider social and political history of mural making. 

In its breadth and presence across London, the 2025 programme reflects on the history and movement of the city today. 

Art on the Underground’s 2025 programme features major commissions situated across London including: 

• a large scale artwork by Ahmet Öğüt at Stratford Underground Station in March 2025 in collaboration with New Contemporaries
• a new artwork by Agnes Denes for the Spring 2025 Pocket Tube Map  
• a new audio work by Rory Pilgrim for Waterloo Station in June 2025 
• and a work by Rudy Loewe for the ninth Brixton Mural Programme in November 2025

Art on the Underground Staff Writer in Residence 2024

The Shark is the first release from the 2024 Art on the Underground Writer in Residence, Kristel Tracey. The work is a reflection and response to A Taste of Home, an artwork by artist Joy Gregory, which is currently on display at Heathrow Terminal 4 Underground station. Like Joy’s artwork, Kristel’s short story is inspired by the stories of the refugee and asylum-seeking communities living in temporary accommodation near the airport and the poems ‘Home’ and ‘Seeds in Flight’ by Warsan Shire and Khaled Abdallah respectively.

Kristel is TfL’s Head of Advocacy and Engagement and has worked for the organisation for just over three years. Previously an avid writer with work published in both print and digital, she is now reexploring her passion for creative writing alongside her career and parenting her 5-year-old daughter.

Kristel said: The stories of the refugee and asylum seeker community Joy spoke to while exceptional and not universal, speak to the deeper feelings of belonging, loss, upheaval, loneliness, anxiety and the desire for home that are universal. We all want to be able to decide for ourselves where home is. It implores the reader to home in on their humanity, rather than headlines that narrow human stories down to dehumanised statistics.

The Art on the Underground Writer in Residence is annual creative opportunity for a TfL staff member to develop their writing by working with TfL’s contemporary art programme Art on the Underground over a period of six months.

The Writer in Residence programme aims to highlight and amplify the creative voices within TfL, creating engaging responses to Art on the Underground’s ongoing programme.

Read the full story below.