Artist Shenece Oretha with Michael La Rose of New Beacon Books outside Finsbury Park Tube station

THE UK’s oldest and only remaining black bookshop and publisher has collaborated with Transport for London (TfL) to create its first ever aural piece of artwork.

Part of its iconic Art on The Underground programme, Route Words: Where are our voices aloud? was unveiled at Finsbury Park Tube station yesterday (Thursday).

Shenece Oretha, 28, the artist who curated the sound artwork, is a former Highbury Fields pupil from Newington Green who grew up going to New Beacon Books in Stroud Green Road.

Ms Oretha’s work, which features a series of voices reading out work published by New Beacon Books, paid homage to the Finsbury Park institution at the event yesterday, calling it “a beacon in my life”.

She said: “The words, the publication of the words, and the voices that they platform shaped my life. And there’s not a lot of spaces that you can find that direct you to those things that root you.

“As a young person, to have a place where you can find something that platforms the thing you love, you want those spaces to continue. And I want people to know about the vital work that they have been doing for 66 years.”

Ms Oretha and Mr La Rose with poets

Michael La Rose, son of the founder John La Rose, called the work Ms Oretha had created as “really important”.

He said: “It was a really important project for us, to get our work and the work of loads of poets and artists out there to the public, for people to hear poetry for the first time.”

He added: “[Poetry] is really important, to keep our spirits alive, to bolster our lives, to give us insights into our situations, [it] is a very human thing. And these poets and the poets we had today and poets generally do that important work.”

The sound clips can be heard by scanning a QR code on posters found across the TfL network. The project will run for two months.

Threatened with closure twice in recent years due to competition from online retailers and the effects of the Covid pandemic, both times New Beacon has come back from the brink thanks to support from the community. Last January a crowdfunding campaign saw the bookshop raise £50,000 in just a few days.

Yesterday, Mr La Rose reassured fans of his bookshop it was staying in Finsbury Park, after speculation last year it may have to relocate.

The artwork was created through the Mayor of London’s Culture and Community Spaces at Risk programme (CCSaR) and saw Ms Oretha also collaborate with Rumi’s Cave in Brent and The RecordShop in Wood Green.

A series of special performances from the collaborating poets and writers and musicians are expected to be held at Finsbury Park Tube over the summer.

London Underground has been known for its pioneering public art since the early 1900s when its then managing director Frank Pick began commissioning artists to undertake work on the Tube.