Last spring, when an upgrade to London’s Notting Hill Gate Underground station uncovered an abandoned passageway filled with vintage posters from the late 1950s, the dingy, worn posters seemed an apt metaphor for the century-old medium itself.
The posters recently unearthed in Notting Hill Tube station are preserved because they once lined a passageway leading to the Circle Line. One of the Underground’s deepest rail lines, the elevators that once took passengers to the lower rail line were replaced by escalators; at that point, the poster-lined corridor was boarded up.
The Notting Hill Gate station posters recall a unique moment in British history. As wartime rationing and postwar restrictions began to ease, marketing executives began to aggressively pursue consumers. These advertisements for Pepsodent Toothpaste and the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, as well as films like Around the World in Eighty Days and The Horse's Mouth, starring Alec Guinness, remind us of when consumer goods began to flood an austerity-weary country.
But the Notting Hill Gate poster hoarding is also a curious time capsule, suggesting an important moment in graphic design history. A 1919 photo of the station’s platform suggests the site before Frank Pick modernized the design of London’s transport system. The recently unearthed posters at Notting Hill Gate were more carefully displayed, following the standardized design strategy innovated by Pick in the interwar years. Years of dirt and grim now smear the posters, but the genius behind Pick’s design is still evident. Set against white subway tiles, the posters’ bright colors, and attention grabbing slogans still jump out of their simple black displays.
Even in the late 1950s, as poster advertising was eclipsed by mass market magazines, billboards, radio, and television in the US, the poster still carried resonance in older cities like London, where pedestrians crowding the Underground were a captive audience for marketing campaigns.
As flows of information are increasingly transmitted in streams of zeros and ones, the poster remains a tangible form of communication. Not only does it exist as a real object, but a poster can express lived space. The Notting Hill Gate posters are now off limits to viewers and the Transit Authority is investigating what to do with them; wherever they end up, it won’t be nearly as intriguing as their current location.
