CorpComms Magazine

Public transport services are hard things to celebrate. If your customers are not moaning about the delays, the dirt or the closure of a station today, they will be tomorrow. So it comes as something of a surprise to discover that Transport for London (TfL) has found its strongest communications tool not in a multi-million-pound PR strategy but in a small poetry project started 20 years ago.

'It started with a letter,' says Judith Chernaik, founder and now editor of Poems on the Underground. 'I wrote out of the blue as a user of the Tube, and wondered if they would consider filling the empty advertising spaces with poems.'

This was back in 1986, and Chernaik, a US academic and novelist who had just moved to London from New York, received a cautious but positive response from what was then London Underground. If she could get the project started, London Underground would help her. Initially, Chernaik says, London Underground gave her 800 spaces to fill for two months, while the British Council provided a £3,000 grant to pay for the printing of the posters.

Together with two friends - poets Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert - Chernaik chose a selection of poems, with the only selfimposed criteria being that at least two living poets be included and that the chosen poems keep the London traveller in mind.

Humble beginnings

'We had no expectations when it started,' says Chernaik. 'We got together in a pub and decided on what poetry we would like to see.' The three also determined that the design of the posters had to be clean, simple and elegant, and that each could contain a maximum of only 14 lines of poetry.

'We didn't want to be didactic or oppressive,' says Chernaik. Today, Poems on the Underground fills 2,000 spaces three times a year for two months at a time. TfL pays distributors Viacom an undisclosed fixed-rate sum for the advertising spaces. The printing costs come out of TfL's umbrella scheme Platform for Art, which has an annual £400,000 budget to cover poetry, art, sculpture and installations.

Chernaik still holds meetings in the pub. 'It's all very informal,' she says. 'We are not an institution, even though we have support from the British Council. We get together and discuss what poems suit the moment.' After last year's terrorist attacks on the London Underground, Chernaik says the team wanted to show how great poets have survived through violent times. 'We hoped the Tube poems we chose at that time could be a source of diversion, even consolation for travellers.' Chernaik admits she had no idea at the time that the project would last so long or that it would spawn a worldwide trend.

There are now poem projects on the carriages of underground systems in Moscow, New York, Helsinki, Vienna, Athens and, most recently, Shanghai. There has even been collaboration between cities, with Chaucer and Shakespeare featuring in China. Over 200 posters from the project are sent around the world every year for classrooms and centres that teach English. An anthology of the poetry, edited by Chernaik and her fellow editors and published by dictionary maker Cassells, has also reached its tenth edition and been a bestseller on the anthology top ten. The ninth edition, published in 1999, sold more than 250,000 copies.

Tamsin Dillon, who heads Platform for Art, says Poems on the Underground is a wonderful marketing tool for TfL because it delivers a positive message in a way that is not overtly commercial. 'What the poems say is that TfL cares about the customer's experience of the journey,' she explains. 'The main message we have to deliver is that our business is safe and efficient, but the poems also show we care about the process of the journey itself.' The poems negate the feeling of claustrophobia and the daily grind, she adds. 'It says our transport system is not just about commerce and toil - it can be about reading moments of genius.'

As a business proposition, Dillon adds, the poems help gauge what people read when on a journey. A few years ago, for example, she commissioned research group Synovate to survey over 600 passengers at various stations at different times of the day to ask if people recognised the Poems on the Underground posters. There was over 80 percent recognition. 'Considering people take over 3 mn journeys on the Tube every day, 80 percent recognition is phenomenal,' says Dillon. 'Commercial companies would pay big money for such acknowledgement.' One company even tried to copy the idea. Confectionary giant Nestlé launched a campaign for Polos that imitated the layout and style of Poems on the Underground - instead of poetry, however, the ads featured silly jingles about mints. Ultimately, Nestlé withdrew the campaign as it infringed on copyright, but the plagiarism was a glowing compliment.

Underground culture

Dillon also points out that while the project itself is the first of its kind in the world, the idea of including culture as part of a journey builds on a legacy that London Underground has had since its early days. In the 1920s London Underground brought together some of the finest architects and artists of the day, such as Charles Holden and Leslie Green, to design the stations. Holden, for example, commissioned a series of sculptures by contemporary artists such as Henry Moore for the exterior of 55 Broadway, headquarters of London Underground. Posters advertising the new thrill of cheap day returns to the West End often included lines of poetry - Keats or Shelley for the countryside, Wordsworth for Oxford street ('Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers'). And in the 1980s, David Hockney and Eduardo Paolozzi were commissioned to contribute works of art to various stations around London. 'Poems on the Underground is part of that history,' says Dillon. 'It builds on the fact that London is a cultural and creative city, and offers a cultural experience - even if you are underground.' Dillon and her marketing team are keen to expand and develop the cultural message with poetry and art even further. 'We constantly look at proposals and think about how artists, including writers, can participate in different ways,' she says. Currently, TfL is running a competition asking people to send in their ideas for what Tube stations will look like in the future. The winners will have their plans turned into posters that will be placed across the London Underground network.

'We have a great space to do this, and each station has its own identity,' says Dillon. 'We need to use this more often.' Intriguingly, and despite the success of the Poems on the Underground anthologies, no living poets have been made famous from being part of the project. Chernaik says this was never an aim, and that if it happened it would be through good luck rather than by design. The editors do choose poems by famous contemporary exponents of the art, but often they use works by people who have never considered themselves poets. 'It gives people a sense that we are not exclusive,' she says. 'It gives a sense of opportunity and creativity.'

And it is exactly that sense that makes Poems on the Underground unique. Essentially it is about people experiencing something that would not usually be part of their day-to-day lives, and even if it is ephemeral, it is authentic.

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