Artlessly, my Norwich-bound “Penalty Fare Service” insinuates its way from under the Gothic vaults of Liverpool Street station. Inside its pallid, fluorescent lit carriages, passengers plug into a battery of laptops, smartphones and headphones, retreating as they do into worlds of their own.
The working day is over. East London terraces and blocks of courtyard council flats give way to grating new Essex cul-de-sacs. The public address system snaps, “If you see something that doesn’t look right, speak to staff or text the British Transport Police . . . ”; the lack of visual stimulus beyond individual passengers’ digital screens doesn’t seem right. Whatever happened, I wondered, to railway art, to those framed pictures that offered a different kind of escape to electronic gizmos, to those of castles, cathedrals, county landscapes or Cornish coves, of maps or even, as with British Rail’s Network SouthEast commuter trains of the 1980s and 1990s, panels, designed by the artist Edward Pond, depicting figurative and abstract rural scenes evoked by speeding trains?
Perhaps these examples are too old fashioned to matter in a screen-focussed age when images rush in and out of retinas faster than fairies, faster even than a class 745 electric express bucking and swaying through what was once thought of as Constable and Gainsborough and Crome and Cotman country.
And, yet, what was special in eras when local and regional identities were pronounced, and anodyne trains things of a far future, was the layering of railway art, from seaside views to abstract compositions, each underpinned by lettering, from Swindon Egyptian to Gill Sans and Rail Alphabet, that spoke of specific design eras and, at the same time, of a desire to make the commonplace special whether in carriages or along station platforms, or on maps and timetables and publicity brochures. It was this layering that gave our railways something of the quality of art galleries, especially in the case of London Transport, where the latest in contemporary art might be displayed alongside the best in folk and pictorial traditions.
What was especially enjoyable on the main line railways was the juxtaposition of public information and summer holiday posters. Here you might find such wonders as Terence Cuneo’s Service to Industry (1962) with modern steam and diesel trains at work at the ICI chemical works at Billingham, near Stockton-on-Tees, yet alongside it the suntanned young blonde of Herne Bay on the Kent Coast — Go by Train.
Over there, a fading copy of John Greene’s London Midland Electrification (1961) showed a blue AL1 locomotive racing under a brooding Cheshire sky framed by a vault of catenary wires beside another blonde beauty, this time a siren snoozing beneath a palm tree with a view of a golden beach — this is Exmouth South Devon (Fast Trains from London Waterloo).
Such contrasting posters ran a gamut from high art and seriousness of purpose to the popular tabloid artistry of Carry On films. As such, they represented the nation, its beauty, its purposes, its machinery, its real working people, its gaiety and its escapist, summer holiday dreams.
There was, though, one transport company that excelled as a public gallery of art of the highest and often most imaginative order. You might never guess today, yet this was London Transport, an organisation remade in 2000 as Transport for London that has slowly if surely robbed its Underground railways of art — design, too — that had not only matched the highest standards found anywhere in the world but set them, too.
I rode to Liverpool Street to catch my “Penalty Fare Service” by Transport for London’s Central Line. The 1992 Tube stock train itself was the very model, I suppose, of democratic, accessible and diverse street art — exciting graffiti, daring “tags”, meaningful scratched and grease-smeared windows. The moquette seats were ripped as if they might be the denims of a beau monde artist of our time. Had the train been sponsored by some ring-nosed arts body?
Its lively artistry was, though, a match for the new wave of platform and escalator shaft posters seen along Tube lines, advising us to “Mind the Gap”, to “Hold the Handrail”, to “Take Care after Drinking Alcohol” and one, a little worn now, dating from the furlough days of the Great Covid Lockdown, instructing us to “Be Kind: Please show respect to one another as we start using the network again”. Such is our behaviour on the Tube in recent years that in 2022, TfL posters warned that “intrusive staring”, “upskirting”, “pressing” and “touching” were intolerable forms of sexual harassment. Who knew?
Perhaps such forms of admonition are required today, and yet their grinding repetition and crude graphic design — the visual equivalent of a platform announcer shouting to no purpose over an ear-splitting public address system — can only encourage us to feel that the Underground is a form of purgatorial punishment rather than the “civilising agent” it once was. There is an organisation, Art for the Underground, that tries to integrate contemporary art into Tube stations yet seems rather too keen to lecture us on social issues rather than to delight us, to lift us, if only momentarily, from our desire to get through the system as fast as we, Tube trains, lifts and escalators can go.
In 1949, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition “Art for All” recognised the extraordinary contribution London Transport had made to bringing contemporary art to the public over forty years. It had not just been art, but architecture and design, indeed artistry in every last detail. “That London Transport stands for an architecture unequalled in transport design in any other metropolis”, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner had written in the Architectural Review in 1942, “and that it has by means of its buildings and publicity the most efficacious centre of visual education in England, is due to one man. Without Frank Pick, London’s transport system may have developed into something no less extensive and well working than we know it today (although this is doubtful) but it would certainly not be the civilising agent that it is.”
Frank Pick was the Spalding-born, congregationalist Chief Executive of the London Passenger Transport Board, the public corporation formed in 1933 to unite, operate and develop London’s public transport over a vast area. Pick had been with the Underground since 1906 and early on had commissioned posters from artists whom, as time went by, he discovered for himself. The extent to which Underground posters captured the public imagination is reflected in their being hung by soldiers in Flanders dugouts off trenches labelled Regent Street, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus and Charing Cross. And, of course, there is Charles Ryder, who in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, hung a McKnight Kauffer Underground poster in his room at Oxford. That was in 1923. Seduced by the aristocratic Flyte family and despite Kauffer’s undoubted brilliance, Ryder would never do such a populist thing again.
As LPTB Chief Executive from 1933, Frank Pick had considerable powers and used these, tirelessly, to shape what was by the Second World War, the world’s finest urban public transport system. “Underneath all the commercial activities of the Board”, he wrote, “underneath all its engineering and operation, there is the revelation and realisation of something which is in the nature of a work of art . . . It is, in fact, a conception of the metropolis as a centre of life, of civilisation, more intense, more eager, more vitalising than has ever so far been obtained.”
In terms of posters alone, Pick introduced the commuting public to the worlds of Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism when brand new, to artists of such incomparable graphic talent as Charles Paine (just look at his 1923 Boat Race) and Edward McKnight Kauffer. The list is long and quite astonishing with, up until September 1939, a new poster commissioned weekly. This pace fell and never recovered, and certainly not after Pick’s leaving the LPTB in 1940 and his sudden death the following year even as he was being considered for a major role in Britain’s post-war reconstruction. Post-war artists and graphic designers, however, continued to see the London Transport poster as “the plum we all look forward to”, as Len Deighton, the future novelist and one of those young hopefuls, put it.
Where can we look for such enlightened patronage of public transport, of railway art today? We must live in hope as we cope with the Central Line and “Penalty Fare” trains from Liverpool Street while, as we do, picturing in our minds’ eyes such delights as Charles Paine’s Boat Race or Claude Buckle’s Racing off Hythe, while turning the pages, believe it or not, of Hawksmoor in London, a London Transport pamphlet of 1976 introducing commuters to the work of the English Baroque architect, and of how to get to see his churches. Art in all its guises once mattered. It really ought to again today. There is, though, a large gap to mind.
