Advertisement posters in London Underground station platforms, specifically the ones on the far sides of the platform beyond the rails, are pasted up on the previous ones, over and over again. When the depth of the poster stacks gets to be too much the layers of paper are torn off.

What’s left is a kaleidoscope of recent advert history, often shredded beyond legibility, producing a rich, if rather chaotic, accidental collage.

These collages aren’t usually there for long. A week or so is the norm; ads equal money, so these are soon stripped properly and then replaced with the next round of advertisements. But that’s long enough to be spotted and captured for the vortex poster topography pages...

These posters were photographed on the Northern Line at Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square stations during early October 2003. More are to follow, so stay tuned!

Click a poster to see a larger version. You may download these images for personal use, but remember these are all the copyright of Keith Martin.

They are now published under a Creative Commons license, specifically an Attribution-ShareAlike license, which allows attributed use as long as derivative works are published using the same license.

If you have questions visit the Creative Commons FAQ pages or go to the vortex forum to get in touch with Keith.

If you want to use any in print much higher resolution versions are available.