Artists and architects are to spend a year attempting to improve life for commuters and workers on the London Underground.
On Monday, Art on the Underground announced details of a project celebrating the Victoria line, which was the first new tube line to be built across central London in 60 years when it opened in 1969, running between Walthamstow and Victoria.
The project, called Underline, will include the underground’s first music commission and a plan by the Turner prize-nominated architectural collective Assemble to improve what is regarded as one of the most unloved station exits on the entire network, at Seven Sisters in north London.
At the heart of all the commissions is the ethos of 19th-century artist William Morris, a Walthamstow resident, who believed that great art should be for everybody.
Eleanor Pinfield, head of Art on the Underground, said there was a thread running through the commissions. She said: “Without suffocating the artists with a kind of strict ‘do something about this, there’, we’ve given the artists the whole line to play with ... it makes it exciting and varied. I’d like people to stumble on something amazing really, something extraordinary.”
Artist Giles Round’s commissioned project is called Design Work Leisure, essentially a design office that aims “to intervene into the fabric of the Victoria line”. On a practical level, that will mean producing prototypes of functional objects that can be used on the tube: a new ceramic tile for patch repairs on the existing tiles, for example, or new clocks, lighting or direction signs.
Assemble, meanwhile, has decided to tackle the ugly entrance/exit at Seven Sisters, which is associated with anti-social behaviour problems. Matt Leung said it was working on ideas that play on how strange and “other-worldly” the act of going so far underground and then travelling at 50mph was.
In the autumn, short films by Liam Gillick, shot across the tube network, will be screened on platforms.
Other commissions include one for the composer Matt Rogers to come up with a piece that is performed live in stations by members of the London Sinfonietta in the spring of 2016. Brixton-based artist Zineb Sedira will close the Underline project with a film and photographic series.
