28 Years Later | Angel of the North — Rust-Red Wings Above the Old A1

Antony Gormley's angel has stood on the spoil heap of a colliery baths above Gateshead since 1998: sixty-six feet of weathering steel, a wingspan wider than a jumbo jet, the surface long since gone the colour of dried blood. It passes by in 28 Years Later as a landmark on the road, and it needs no dressing at all. Twenty-eight years of neglect would leave it looking much as it does now, because the whole point of the alloy is that the rust is the finish.

Getting there is undramatic. There is a small car park off Durham Road, a path, and then the thing itself, much bigger up close than it looks from the A1. People touch the feet. The steel is warm in sun and brutally cold otherwise, and the ribs across the wings are welded seams the size of your forearm.

Stand directly underneath and look up along the wing. From there it stops being a silhouette on a hill and becomes a piece of shipyard engineering, which is what it was always meant to be.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).