New art on display at Notting Hill Gate Underground Station

Those of you who pass through Notting Hill Gate Underground Station regularly will have noticed the glorious art installation Declaration of Independence by Barby Asante that has been on display there since 2023. From today, 25th March 2026, Transport for London (TfL) has unveiled a new art installation at the station, we move through scales of blue by London-based artist Phoebe Boswell. The new work is also part of TfL’s wonderful Art on the Underground programme, and Boswell’s installation will also be on display at Bethnal Green station in East London.

Running next to the escalators at Notting Hill Gate station, the installation comprises four photographic artworks that simulate movement as you move up or down the escalators. This art continues Boswell’s exploration of themes that include water, freedom and migration through a Black feminist diasporic lens. It will invite customers to reflect on their interactions with nature, even within the busy urban environment that is London.

To create the artwork. Boswell photographed Black and non-white swimming communities underwater, with participants responding intuitively to her prompts. Boswell also gathered reflections from the swimmers about their relationship with water, creating space within the art for their stories. Fragments of these conversations can be seen as a collective flowing text in an artwork guide available at Bethnal Green and Notting Hill Gate Underground stations.

The underground Walbrook and Westbourne Rivers have a similar developmental history to the London Underground network, so this art commission traces the idea of the waterway, evoking journeys and migratory routes to, from and within London, particularly for Black diasporic communities. The commission also responds to the Black Swimming Association’s statistic that 96% of Black British people don’t swim regularly, and invites audiences to consider reclaiming water as a space of healing and renewal. It is guided by a hydro-feminist view that all bodies of water are connected and promotes a shared understanding of the world and the stories within our bodies. 

It has been an immense pleasure to engage with both these public sites as spaces to consider waterways and our relationship to them. I have so much gratitude for all the participants who joined me in our underwater studio, for their generosity in bringing their presence and their stories to this work. The process of the gathering is always revelatory and transformative; we are all unique and infinitely whole, and yet intricately connected and interdependent across histories and geographies. This ultimately informed how I shaped each tableau figuratively within the liquid abstraction of the water, with each person’s journey flowing fluidly into the next. I hope the work brings a moment of pause, breath and reflection during people’s commute.

Phoebe Boswell, artist

Phoebe Boswell’s new artwork engages deeply with the idea of the Underground as a series of connections. Situated alongside escalators in the east and west of the city, Boswell’s sublime images connect us to hidden waterways in the city and allude to journeys – over water, through generations – of those of live in London today. With resonances to the history of animation and participants gathered from the local area, Boswell’s reflective work will engage millions who pass through the stations over the course of its display.

Eleanor Pinfield, Head of Art on the Underground

About the artist, Phoebe Boswell

Phoebe Boswell is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who is interested in the liminal space between our collective histories and imagined futures; how we see ourselves and each other, and, consequently, how we free ourselves, or imagine freedom. Her figurative and interdisciplinary practice adopts an errant, diasporic framework, moving intuitively across media from drawing and painting to film, video, sound, and writing, to create immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy.  

Boswell’s work is held and exhibited in public institutions globally, and she has previously received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.

About Art on the Underground

Art on the Underground celebrated 25 years last year, a programme that produces critically acclaimed projects that are accessible to all and which draw together London’s diverse communities. The programme recently launched the latest edition of its Art Map, a guide to help customers visit all 26 permanent artworks now on display across the London Underground network.