The Underground takes on a different timbre this month as Find Miracles, a new sound work by Turner Prize-nominated artist Rory Pilgrim, infiltrates Waterloo Station’s moving walkways. Commissioned by TfL’s Art on the Underground, the piece extends Pilgrim’s ongoing dialogue with communities entangled in the criminal justice system, this time threading London’s architectural grandeur back to the quarries of Dorset’s Isle of Portland—where the stone beneath our feet was hewn by hands too often confined.
From today until 25 July, between 10:00 and 17:00, commuters will encounter Pilgrim’s 10-minute composition: a layered tapestry of spoken word and choral arrangement, developed with the Prison Choir Project, Peckham’s Feminist Library, and the Mayor’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk initiative. The work doesn’t just play in the station; it unfolds there, its echoes bouncing off the very Portland stone that built Waterloo’s arches and TfL’s Broadway headquarters.
Pilgrim’s practice has long probed the fissures between institutional power and collective resilience. Here, he turns the Underground into an acoustic conduit between London and Portland—a site where labour, incarceration, and geology collide. Recorded in the belly of a disused quarry and on an abandoned Jubilee Line platform, the piece operates as a call-and-response, with poet Carina Murray and Holly Upton (Neurodiversity Manager at HMP/YOI Portland) threading their reflections through Pilgrim’s score. The melodies, shaped in part by individuals detained at Portland’s prisons, rise and fall like quarry dust settling on old wounds.
What does it mean to listen in a space designed for transit? Pilgrim’s installation forces a reckoning. QR codes scattered across the station link to visual accompaniments, while leaflets—available for the taking—document the work’s gestation. It’s Art that refuses to be background noise.
Eleanor Pinfield, Head of Art on the Underground, describes the piece as “a fissure in the everyday,” one that “asks commuters to hear the city differently.” For Holly Upton, the project has already ruptured routines at HMP/YOI Portland: “Prison narrows worlds. This reminded people—inside and out—that walls can vibrate with something beyond their weight.”
The commission arrives as Art on the Underground marks its 25th year, a milestone punctuated by Agnes Denes’ reimagined Tube map and upcoming interventions from Ahmet Öğüt (Stratford Station, September) and Rudy Loewe (Brixton, November). Yet Pilgrim’s work lingers differently. It doesn’t decorate the commute; it disrupts it, pressing against the edges of what public Art can demand from a passing crowd.
Top Photo: Poster images: Poster for Rory Pilgrim, Go Find Miracles, 2025. Commissioned by Art on the Underground. Photo: Benedict Johnson