Poetry in Lights: Ever Immortalised, London

The words catch me mid-step, mid-thought as I move through Camden station - pulling my eyes

from my phone, forcing a pause. Mouth open, I stare as each word stands two feet high, all caps, glowing white, hovering directly above my line of sight. Then I realize: I’m walking through Art. Suddenly it hits me… A sense of loss. Or maybe the feeling of a community slipping away in real time. This is poetry pushing back. This is Poetry in Lights. Poems by poet and artist Robert Montgomery, commissioned by Euston Town BID, MTArt Agency, and A Space for Us: The People’s Museum Somers Town, turn the neighbourhood into an illuminated living page.

At first glance, you might assume this is the familiar pattern: a well-known artist arriving,

installing his own words, then leaving. That isn’t what happened here. Aware of his position as an outsider, Montgomery spoke with residents, held town meetings, and listened. Each jarring statement shaped collaboratively, with the people of Somers Town, usingtheir language, their concerns, their lived experience. Temporary? Not really. These poems will live on the streets for the next two years, glowing night after night “I LIVE ON THE SAME STREETS AS MY ANCESTORS SOMERS TOWN A BEACON OFSOCIAL HOUSING, A DREAM of EQUALITY”. - a reminder that a community is still here.

At first glance, it looks small. Five buildings, words projected. But the language lingers. Rising rents. Quiet displacement. The slow rebranding of a lived-in neighbourhood as the “next hotspot”. Slowing us down, the work pulls us out of our heads. Heidegger called it a “clearing in the mind” Apause. In a world flattened by images, where everything is consumed, bought, sold, packaged, as Marine Tanguy notes, attention is a commodity. This is different. Poetry in Lightsdoes not sell. It does not advertise….Yet you stop. Read. Feel. Connect with yourself, and most importantly with the people whose words these are. Reclaiming space. Making lives visible. Reclaiming meaning from a world built

to consume it.

That pause is its power. Not performative. Not commodified. Just words in the street.

Montgomery: “I once imagined a city where every morning you could see people’s dreams written in neon lights outside their bedroom windows. This project is as close as I’ve got to that so far.“ Somers Town & Camden aren’t unique. Displacement is everywhere. Not only physical It’s emotional. Ways of life thin. Histories soften. Sometimes, they disappear. The real question is-will we let them?