Who, when travelling on the London Underground, hasn’t gone up the escalators with a spring in their step after reading Adrian Mitchell’s Celia Celia (“When I walk along High Holborn / I think of you with nothing on”) or been soothed by Carol Ann Duffy’s Prayer? This month Poems on the Underground celebrates its 40th anniversary.
Inspired by a reading of As You Like It, Judith Chernaik, an American writer living in London, conceived a plan to scatter poetry across the underground as the love-sick Orlando hangs sonnets through the Forest of Arden. Her simple idea took root below the sewers and spread to cities across the world. Poetry in Motion launched in New York in 1992, and today poems can be found on public transport in Dublin, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai, Warsaw and Moscow.
