A new friend for the North

Gateshead: After initial hesitation about its merits, this North-eastern town has taken to the gigantic figure that will be seen by some 33 million people a year

THE NOBS and southerners have all gone. Lord Gowrie, Anthony Gormley, Janet Street-Porter and the rest. And the people of Gateshead have been left alone with their Angel. They were not, thankfully, subjected to the presence of the plummy art critic Brian Sewell, who opined from the safety of the capital that Gormley's statue was vulgar, should be pulled down and the little North-eastern town bombed to the ground.

Gateshead responded with more sophistication. "We hope he is very happy living in London," the leader of the town council, George Gill, responded drily.

Not that controversy has been restricted to a north-south axis. The Angel of the North is destined to become Britain's most-viewed public work of art. Sited next to the A1 and the railway between London and Edinburgh, it will be passed by 33 million people a year.

But its erection has not been without controversy locally. There were petitions against its "Nazi gigantism", fears that its 175ft- wingspan might interfere with television reception and complaints that the pounds 800,000 it cost would have been better spent in schools or hospitals. The androgynous anonymity of its figure in the preliminary drawings earned it condemnation as "a monument devoid of meaning - the perfect symbol for our vacuous times".

"The row is all part of the art," said Sean O'Brien, as he peered through owlish specs up at the towering sinuous statue with its huge rust-coloured wings. "You see the Angel through what you have heard or read." O'Brien is nothing to do with the sculpture.

He is a local poet of substance (his last volume, Ghost Train, won the Forward Prize) and he is currently engaged on an intriguing CD-Rom project with a dozen other writers, artists and computer programmers to produce The Book of the North, to re-imagine the region in a new mythological geography. I had invited him along as a cultural mediator.

We were stood on the windy knoll at the side of the A1 which was once the site of the pit baths of Team Colliery. Building rubble and big chunks of coal were visible amid the soil cleared around the massive plinth on which the metal giant had somehow landed. It was an odd juxtaposition of the human and the mechanical. Its face had the blankness of a computer- generated mummy, its torso was ribbed and subtle, and its flat square- cut wings spoke of something man-made, for there are no right-angles in sentient nature. Yet the Angel is alive. "See its legs, tensed, like a diver on a board," said O'Brien, "or a gymnast waiting to seize the rings."

Though the luminaries had all departed, the birth-pangs continued. Scaffolding now stood between body and limbs. And the noise - the rumble of the crane, hum of a generator, and screeching of grinders - sounded like the great creature's breathing. Periodically a welder's magnesium-white light flashed by the heart of the body and sparks tumbled in rolls down the ribbed trunk, prompting the half-thought that the electricity might spark the figure into action to stalk the bleak, wide-skied landscape like a latterday Frankenstein's monster.

For there is ambiguity about the Angel. Some have seen a menace in it, which is perhaps why reservations were still being expressed among men in the nearby pubs or women walking their dogs. A small number resent that the sculpture has been imposed upon them by councillors who live in other parts of the town. And yet you could say the same of an intrusive motorway or banal superstore. As Sean O'Brien put it: "It's as if the resentment comes out of the idea that art is decorative and superfluous, rather than something integral to life.

"It is the same utilitarian calculus which insists that the money (which came from the National Lottery's art budget) should have gone on health or education. But art dignifies a place," he said, "and conveys a sense of the value of the people who live there."

Aptly enough, evidence of that came from a welder rather than a poet. Steve Robinson, clad in harness over his orange overalls, descended from the scaffold where he had been inserting the final plates between the body and the wings.

"No one's ever attempted anything like this before," the welder from Hartlepool Steel Fabrications said. "For us it is something different to have a finished job we can look at and be proud of. I've been on this for seven months now. It will be odd to be back to humdrum pipework for the gas and oil industry next week. It will be a bit of an anti-climax."

Art counts for nothing if it does not move, but it is not simply its aesthetic which elevates the spirit. It is a vehicle for pride too. The economy is booming in Gateshead. Unemployment has halved in recent times, confidence among manufacturers is higher than in any other UK region and local companies last year increased their turnover at three times the national average.

Yet Gateshead is probably one of the least fashionable places in England. There is a sense here as people contemplate the Angel that "we needed something like this - it shows what we can do".

With surprising speed the local people are, then, taking possession of the Angel of the North. "A lot of people who didn't like it at first say it's growing on them," said Joan Grey, landlady of the nearby pub which was until recently The Old Barn Inn but is now renamed The Angel View. "Some people are coming every day to look at it."

There is even a sense of ownership about the dissent: "The Angel Ate My Hamster," says the graffiti on the plinth. Visitors come to its feet in a steady stream - boys on their way to football, a snake of schoolchildren with their teacher, three OAPs who had taken the bus from Sunderland and then walked shakily with their sticks to the base.

"It's a magnificent piece of engineering," said Alan Hall, a retired shuttering joiner who had been born and bred in Gateshead and who had come from Seaham to see the edifice. "Just the plinth alone is a great piece of work. The foundation piles go 60ft into the earth and they say the bolts which fasten it down are 7ft apiece."

And an angel is just right. There was one suggestion that Gormley should have been asked to sculpt a miner in commemoration of the industry which dominated the local economy for 600 years, until Thatcherism. But that would have been to look to the past, and there is already too much "heritage" stuff around in the North. An angel is a being which mediates between Heaven and Earth and this one, with its feet in an extinct mine and its wings in a sky silver with hope, joins the area's past with its future. Made from the materials of the wreckage of the old industry - the steel has copper added to make it look rusty - it aspires to something transcendent. This angel is secular yet cruciform. It is made of manifestly heavy substance and yet it can fly. It is the stuff of incarnation, for the material of this earth is all that we have from which to construct our dreams.

Wild tree-whipping winds blew up yesterday morning. The weathermen spoke of force 12 and the bridges over the Tyne were closed to high-sided vehicles. But the Angel looked unperturbed in its new home. It stood, swaying like a giant oak, its massy wings outstretched in welcome to those who ventured North with an open mind.

Making an angel, the Magazine