London is Open: an art poster giveaway on the tube is happening tomorrow

Back in July, after the UK voted to the leave the EU and xenophobic hate-crime spiked, Sadiq Khan launched a campaign called ‘London is Open’ to show the world that our city still welcomes people and ideas from across the globe. As part of the campaign, major British and international artists including David Shrigley, Jeremy Deller, Bedwyr Williams, Gillian Wearing and Tania Bruguera created new work to be displayed at every tube station – all 270 of them.

Now the ‘Art for Everyone’ initiative goes a step further. Tomorrow morning (Tuesday November 22) you can pick up some free ‘London is Open’ artwork to take home with you, as the giveaway originally scheduled for earlier this month goes ahead.

For one morning only, the Mayor’s office will be distributing one-off posters at Tottenham Court Road, Vauxhall, King’s Cross, Shepherd’s Bush and Stratford tube stations. Each poster is limited to a run of 5,000, so get down early and you could grab your very own piece of positive art. (My favourite: Hew Locke and Indra Khanna’s ‘Mappa Mundi’, a poster of street names from throughout London named after other countries.)

There’ll also be badges and postcard sets available, plus 50 tote bags by Jeremy Deller at each station from 7.30am. If that isn’t enough reason to get out of bed early on a grey Tuesday, I don’t know what is.

‘Dear World – our city has not changed’: read Time Out’s open letter from June 2016.