Poems on the Underground

You're sitting on a sweltering Central Line tube carriage wearing a jacket too warm for the day; the podcast on your headphones endlessly buffering. In an attempt to avoid eye contact with the person opposite, your gaze drifts up towards the ceiling. There, between ads for the London Dungeon and a new crypto investment app, is a simple panel - black text on a white background. Eight lines of verse, written by an 8th century Chinese poet.

As Poems on the Underground marks its 40th birthday, this programme is the story of how that poem came to be there and why. We speak to one of the founders of the scheme, Judith Chernaik, about how it got started, and to the poets and passengers who have been part of one of the largest public art interventions of all time.

"When I saw my first Poem on the Underground decades ago, I was so taken with the poem that I missed my stop," says poet Imtiaz Dharker, one of the panel who selects poems for the scheme. "It was only years later that I understood the drive behind it: an absolute belief in the necessity of poetry, its power in the places where we live and travel every day."

Produced by Mair Bosworth
A BBC Audio production for Radio 4