Transport for London’s (TfL’s) Art on the Underground programme has announced an exciting list of artworks that will launch in 2024, with major new pieces by internationally renowned artists to be unveiled throughout the year and a new art commission for one of the Underground stations at Heathrow Airport. It comes as Reed a family run recruitment and business services company has been confirmed as the annual sponsor for the art programme.

Art on the Underground will continue in 2024 its tradition of working with contemporary artists to consider the history of art on the transport network and the collective experience of travel, through the stations themselves and the communities around them. Next year’s commissions give voice to the diversity and movement of the city today, continuing Art on the Underground’s commitment to creating meaningful and expansive dialogues with artists, publics and public space.

More people from across London and visitors to the capital are already enjoying the range of diverse artworks that feature across London’s transport network, with new ridership figures from TfL showing that that Tube ridership is now at round 88 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, with around 24.4 million journeys made each week. Specifically on Thursdays, ridership levels are reaching around 4 million for the first time since the pandemic demonstrating that London is thriving once again.

The programme’s major commissions for next year include:

A series of artworks in the rotunda at Heathrow Terminal 4 Underground station in June by British artist and photographer Joy Gregory, focussing on themes of migration and plants and created in dialogue with refugees and asylum seekers in Hillingdon. The works envisage Heathrow as a gateway to London and seek to honour the stories and futures of people whose realities are often maligned or misrepresented
London and Beirut-based artist Joe Namy will produce a new sound work with the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme, bringing a new audio work to the London Underground network in July, focussing on the social construction of music and organised sound
British artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings will create a permanent mosaic work at historic St James’s Park station, situated beneath TfL’s former headquarters, in October. Through their work, the artists unpack the various forms of authority, power and disorder within our public spaces and question how social hierarchy, class and obedience are negotiated. Their mosaic, a diptych across six panels is inspired by philosopher Walter Benjamin’s description of artist Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as an image of the ‘angel of history’*. Quinlan and Hastings’s artwork for St James’s Park will consider a period of political nostalgia, situated between Westminster – where the future is debated – and the Royal palaces, where the past is preserved
Leading British artist Claudette Johnson will create a new mural artwork at Brixton station in November, as the eighth artist in the series of commissions at Brixton Tube station which, since 2018, has responded to the diverse narratives of the local murals painted in the 1980s. A founding member of the BLK Art Group in Wolverhampton in the early 1980s, Johnson is one of the foremost figurative artists working in Britain today. Challenging harmful stereotypes of representation through figuration and gesture, Johnson’s work gives space and power to the presence of Black women and men and offers a mediation on shared humanity
British artist Rita Keegan, who co-founded the Brixton Art Gallery in 1983 and established the Women Artists of Colour Index (WOCI) in 1985, will develop a new commission exploring the history of moquette design for the pocket Tube Map in August. Keegan’s work explores memory, history, dress and textiles, with the new Tube map cover to look into London Underground’s archive of Tube seat moquette fabrics to identify a textile design rumoured to have been produced by the late artist Althea McNish, marking the centenary of her birth