The Angel of the North
The Angel of the North is the most visible and the most discussed public artwork in Britain, a steel sculpture standing beside the A1 road at Gateshead in Tyne and Wear that has become one of the defining images of the northeast of England and a landmark of international reputation since its installation in February 1998. Created by sculptor Antony Gormley, the Angel rises 20 metres from its hillside position and spreads its wings 54 metres wide, making it one of the largest sculptures in Britain and ensuring its visibility to the millions of motorists who pass on the busy road below each year. Gormley conceived the work as a meditation on the transition from an age of coal and industry to an uncertain post-industrial future, placing the figure on a hilltop above the former Team Colliery whose pit baths still lie beneath the ground on which the Angel stands. The industrial heritage of the site was a deliberate choice: the connection between the figure and the mining community whose lives played out on this hillside gives the work a historical grounding that purely aesthetic public art often lacks. The wings, Gormley noted, are not the soft wings of religious iconography but the hard structural wings of aircraft, referencing both flight and the engineering tradition of the northeast. The technical achievement of the installation is considerable. The sculpture weighs 200 tonnes, the wings alone containing 110 tonnes of steel, and the structure is anchored by 600 tonne concrete foundations that extend twenty metres into the ground to counteract the wind loads on the wing surfaces. The steel was manufactured by Hartlepool Steel Fabrications, a surviving example of the heavy industrial tradition the Angel commemorates, and the structure is designed to withstand wind speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Public reaction to the sculpture before its installation was polarised, with considerable scepticism among local residents who doubted whether the cost was justified and questioned the aesthetic merits of the work. Twenty-five years on, the Angel has been adopted with unmistakable affection by the northeastern communities it was meant to serve and has become a source of regional pride that was initially difficult to predict.