Art on the Underground: a public contradiction

Rudy Loewe’s commission at Brixton Underground Station is a case in point. Launching in November 2025, this work will form part of the now well established Brixton Mural Programme by seeking to build upon the area’s diverse narratives by highlighting the ways people gather together in this urban environment. The ‘bold, flat colours’ that characterise Loewe’s aesthetic will undoubtedly chime with Brixton’s own multicultural offering – providing Brixton’s community an opportunity to recognise, and even reclaim, their lived experiences in dialogue with the art. Certainly this is what Claudette Johnson’s current (2024) Brixton commission, Three Women, has sought to achieve.

Nonetheless, as student’s taking the Liberal Arts BA module Lives of London will know too well, it is difficult to ignore the broader tensions at play in public art projects such as these. While Art on the Underground offers an important opportunity to foreground alternative histories, it does so under the banner of what we might call ‘City Branding’ or, more crudely, urban advertising. Justine Simons, Deputy Mayor for Culture and Creative Industries, has praised the 25th anniversary of Art on the Underground in this vein:

That world ‘renown’ is working hard to pay back those investing in the programme. Indeed, as Jennifer Harvie has taught us in relation to the Tate Modern Gallery – also on the verge of its 25th anniversary – in the twenty-first century, it has become impossible to remove art galleries from the dominant ideological systems that produce, maintain and continue to fund them.

In the case of Loewe’s Brixton Commission, is this artwork not just another example of the area’s own state-sponsored branding? Another mechanism by which a unique part of London’s geography is leveraged for a commercial gain? After all, the Brixton Mural Programme appears a natural inheritor of the 1993 government programme – rather problematically named ‘the United Colours of Brixton’ – which offered, in the words of Loretta Lees, ‘not grassroots multiculturalism’ but ‘establishment cosmopolitanism’. That is to say, an opportunity to ‘make Brixton the centre of multicultural entertainment and shopping in south London’.

Against this backdrop, Art on the Underground is in danger of being seen as yet another tool by which public art is deployed to accelerate an area’s gentrification. Art becomes an attraction to which external visitors travel, rather than a community practice sustained and maintained at a local level.

Perhaps these tensions are best embodied in Rory Pilgrim’s audio commission at Waterloo Station, another piece of the 25th anniversary programme opening in July. Commissioned as part of the Mayor’s programme for Culture and Community Spaces at Risk, the sound piece is set to transform and disrupt the drudgery of commuter behaviour through a much needed amplification of marginalised voices. Here, public art is serving as a platform for those who would otherwise persist unheard in amongst the city’s dominant narratives.

The importance of this method, as showcased in Pilgrim’s 2023 Turner Prize portfolio, cannot be understated. But the artwork’s ability to have a long-term and reverberating impact – something all the more important given its support via the Mayor of London – is undermined by structural constraints. The sound-work is to be limited to a 2 week run; the need for commuters to proceed unimpeded and dominant voices to remain is, it seems, too strong.

Such contradictions are at the heart of public art, which is driven, in turn, by the twin forces of educating and inspiring its audience, while also ensuring a return (reputational, if not financial) for those funding such work. It is a set of tensions that were present in the year 2000, when London positively embraced this now 25 year relationship with public modern art. And, on the dawn of this 25th anniversary, it seems that these contradictions are not set to go away.

Dr George Legg is Head of the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities and leads the module Lives of London on the Liberal Arts BA. His research examines capitalism through the conjoined perspectives of historical geography, critical theory and cultural production. You can read about his research on London's built environment in the following publications: 'Excavating Racial Capitalism in London's West India Docks' and 'Kae Tempest, London and the digital affects of neoliberalism'.