Art on the Underground 2025: the whale tail that stopped a train crash honoured among new tube art commissions

Travelling on London’s Tube system is never a terribly dignified or scintillating affair. While a robust public transport system is a blessing, it’s somehow always too hot down there and you have to try very hard not to think about the London Underground’s own mosquito subspecies, or all that hairy tube dust they have to send people down to hoover up.

But Art on the Underground offers some joyful relief. Launched in 2000, it commissions work from artists to adorn everything from stations to pocket maps. Those colourful lenticular shapes at Tottenham Court Road or the Mark Wallinger-designed labyrinth signs you can spot at 272 stations? Just two of the many pieces of public art installed by the programme in its 25 years. Four new art pieces have now been announced, to be installed or rolled out over the year.

Stratford Underground Station is set to get a large-scale piece by conceptual artist Ahmet Öğüt. Called Saved by the Whale’s Tail, Saved by Art, the piece is a response to the Rotterdam Metro accident in 2020, where an empty train that over-ran its stop almost crashed off a viaduct and into a canal.

The driver was saved when the train came to rest on one of the twin sculptures of whale tails installed by artist Maarten Struijs in 2002. The public will be invited to submit stories of how art saves lives, with the prize for the most moving submission to be trophy-like sculpture. The project will launch in March.

Turner Prize nominee and composer Rory Pilgrim is creating a soundscape for Waterloo Station. It’s being created in collaboration with the Community Spaces at Risk (CCSaR) programme, which offers support to community and cultural spaces facing threats to their sustainability. The piece will play for two weeks in July over the station speakers on the moving walkway that connects the Jubilee and Northern lines.

Brixton Station is getting a colourful piece by Ruby Loewe, a visual artist whose work uses African and Caribbean folklore to explore the British government’s attempts to dismantle the Black resistance movements of the Sixties and Seventies. Loewe is the ninth artist to be comissioned to produce work in response to Brixton’s Eighties-era murals. The artwork is due to be installed in November.

The fourth Art on the Underground piece billed for 2025 is an artwork for the 41st Pocket Tube Map. The 94-year-old artist Agnes Denes is creating an “electrified” version of her 1980 piece Map Projections, which turned maps of the Earth into mathematical shapes such as doughnut. The new maps will be out in spring.

“Across 2025, the programme will interrogate how art can save us and what it means to gather together, in shared space and with local communities,” said head of Art on the Underground Eleanor Pinfield. “Seen and heard by millions, the 2025 programme is a response to London today, whilst always reflecting on our past and possible futures.”

Even if Sadiq Khan’s cheap Friday fares plan was a flop, these new artworks will surely jazz up any commute.