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If you've lived in London for any length of time you will have walked past snippets of James McInerney's poetry.

They're on billboards at the city's airports, on shopping centre screens and increasingly on message boards in the capital's Tube stations.

Addressing issues around love and mental health, James' poetry began to appear at Tube stations in December last year.

He saw the message boards being used for something a little bit more creative than the usual travel warnings by staff and thought poetry could be the next step.

He told MyLondon: "I was thinking it’d be nice to have some quotes on their boards. Some positive things for people to read."

And who doesn't need a bit more positivity on our commute, when we are scrambling to squeeze onto a train and hoping not to end up with our face embedded in someone else's armpit.

He contacted TfL (Transport for London) and bosses loved the idea. Suddenly his poetry was greeting commuters at Wembley Central and Piccadilly Circus.



(Image: James McInerney)

From there James' poetry took a life of its own.

Staff at shopping centres and stations across the UK saw the project in action around London and wanted to do something similar.

"Thirty shopping centres over the country!" James said with a little awe. "I've [also] got two weeks of phone meetings to sort out."

His poetry appears daily at Waterloo and London Bridge.

James thinks its popularity stems from it all being free. He's not getting any money for it and the poetry is not trying to sell anything to those enjoying it.

He said: "There’s no catch. People like that. Real credit goes to the places who have come on board because they’ve given up the space where they could probably be making money, to give something to the commuters."

James recently got a message from a woman who missed her train because she was reading one of his poems at a station.

"That obviously means a lot", he said.



(Image: James McInerney)

But the project was also experimental. James said: "I went in with a plan to put poetry in the weirdest place you could imagine," he explained.

"I wanted to experiment. You'd never see it in a shopping centre or train station. You’d never see it in a major airport. But now we’re in all of them. We’ve got poetry into places you’d never see it."

Mental health is such an important part of the project for James - to use poetry to help others like it helped him.

"I suffered depression and poetry saved me," he said. "Poetry tends to be more emotional. People bottle up their emotions and that can make it worse.

"If people see how they’re feeling in poetry it can help. It’s like reading someones diary, you read their personal thoughts.

"It can say you’re not alone."

(Image: James McInerney)

James came to be a poet in a roundabout way. At school he was never taught in a way that spoke to him.

He said: "You’d do a bit of Shakespeare but it was not until later on that I got into it.

"I just started writing one day. I had no interest in poetry, I hadn’t read poems but I did it. And it's taken off - the places I’ve gone and the boxes it’s ticked.



"It made me think this is what I was meant to be."

(Image: James McInerney)

The 42-year-old has been writing poetry since 1998. Although he lives in Northampton he travels down to London a lot and his poetry is scattered across the city.

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Those travelling abroad can also enjoy his work with a new permanent fixture of James' poetry soon to be installed at Stansted Airport.

The next step of the project is collaborating with actors. Maxine Peake from Shameless and Ellen Adair from Homeland, among others, have made recordings reading his poetry.