The Angel of the North: Gateshead’s Giant and What It Says About the Northeast

Gormley was commissioned by Gateshead Council in 1994. The site – a former colliery spoil heap on the hill south of the A1, visible to millions of people each year travelling the main north-south road – was chosen to maximise visibility and to occupy a landscape that carried the history of northeast industry. Below the hill, for decades, men had worked in the mines. The sculpture that would stand on their former workplace was explicitly connected to that industrial heritage by Gormley in his concept.

Gormley’s work had been developing a vocabulary of the human figure in industrial and natural landscapes throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Field, Another Place, Event Horizon – the recurring concern with how human bodies occupy and transform spaces. The Angel of the North, at 20 metres tall with a wingspan of 54 metres, took this to a scale he had not previously attempted in a public commission.

The proposal was not welcomed by everyone. Local objections included concerns about the visual impact on a residential area, doubts about whether public money should fund art rather than services, and a general scepticism about the value of large public sculpture. Gateshead Council received hundreds of letters opposing the project. The local press ran sustained critical coverage. One objector described it as “the biggest waste of money in Britain.”

The planning process extended through 1995 and 1996. Permission was eventually granted, funding from the Arts Council of England and the European Regional Development Fund was secured, and construction began in 1997. The steel – 200 tonnes of weathering steel designed to rust to a stable reddish-brown over time – was fabricated in Hartlepool. The foundations alone required 600 tonnes of concrete to anchor the structure against winds of 100 miles per hour.

The Angel was unveiled on 15 February 1998. The shift in public opinion was rapid and dramatic. Within months, the sculpture that had attracted hundreds of objections was attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. The viewing area at the base became one of the most visited locations in the northeast. The image of the figure on the hill, arms spread at a downward angle that suggests both embrace and landing, became ubiquitous in regional promotion within a year of opening.

The Angel works as public art partly because Gormley got the scale right – it is big enough to be seen from the road at speed and to demand attention without being so enormous that it becomes abstract – and partly because the form is both familiar and strange. The human figure, universally recognisable. The industrial material, visually connected to the region’s steel and coal history. The wings, which are not the wings of any bird but of something older and more ambiguous. It does not mean one thing. That is the point of it, and why it continues to be compelling twenty-five years after it was built.