What's the point in all this public art?

Maud Webster
May 15
9 min read

The North East is peppered with art. Short term cycles of government investment and regeneration programmes can leave them stranded, forgotten and neglected. How can we make the most of them?

Maud Webster reflects on these ubiquitous and dynamic features of the urban realm, and how they can evolve to foster community and hope for the future.

Each morning, heading to work, I pass Newcastle Civic Centre’s River God (1968). This bronze behemoth clings to the side of the Civic by his feet, left hand pointed down, face hidden by a tarnished slosh of hair. Water trickles from his right hand into a concrete basin below.

In any of the North East’s cities or towns, you’d be hard-pressed to walk ten minutes without passing by (or walking on - cough, Heatherwick’s Blue Carpet (2004)) a piece of public art, be that a statue, a mural, a sculpture, graffiti (controversial!), or even an ‘ephemeral’ piece of art (think temporary installations or performances). Post-war, especially during the 1960s and onwards, England experienced a boom in the installation of civic art.

The River God isn’t the only emblematic piece of art centred around the Tyne. Swirle Pavilion (1998) next to the Millenium Bridge (Newcastle side) was commissioned by the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation as part of the £178m East Quayside regeneration, a masterplan which promoted civic sculpture. The Pavilion is inscribed with several names of ports sailed to from Newcastle, including Hamburg, Rotterdam and Malmö. Its name comes from the Swirle Burn, one of Newcastle’s many ‘hidden’ rivers that peters out into the Tyne.

Making and maintaining Civic art is not cheap; materials can cost a pretty penny, and most often funding allocated for the commissioning, creation and placing of public art doesn’t cover their long-term maintenance. As a result, many pieces are lost, destroyed, or sold off by local councils or organisations responsible for them. Before Haymarket Metro Station was rebuilt in 2008, Shoulder To Shoulder (1999), more commonly known as the ‘Newcastle Lego Men’, comprised of 52 concrete figures creating a ‘safety barrier’ around the station. They ended up in storage until 2011 when the Council was alleged to have sold them off on eBay; a couple of these concrete Lego Men ended up in a front garden in Fawdon, but the whereabouts of the rest is unknown.

Lots of public art is placed with long-term intentions, but later get picked up and moved around. The placement of Irene Brown’s Racing Ahead (1995) in Stockton has changed numerous times, as a result of several redevelopment works. The painted statues of three dogs were originally placed on Dovecot Street, then the High Street, and now (due to concerns about the staues being a hazard for visually impaired pedestrians) outside the town’s library.

The Tyne and Wear Metro have long been significant subscribers to public art, with a portfolio of more than forty pieces across their stations. They’re still pushing this tradition. As Nexus’s Customer Services Director Huw Lewis puts it, these pieces of permanent and temporary art act as a “quirk on the journey”, providing intrigue and sometimes a smile to the face of commuters and tourists alike. Installations on new rolling Metro stock up this game, including a selection of custom art pieces which will be present in every new metro car. One of the four murals was created by Sofia Barton, whose piece Trailblazers (2024) explores hidden histories of the people who have made the North East a vibrant place to live. The annual Nexus ‘Poetry on the Metro’ competition locates poetry on the walls of Longbenton Station, with previous winning entries often touching on micro and macro histories of the Tyne and Wear area.

Moving from travel by rail to travel by foot; public art also often finds a valuable use in waymarking. Victoria Brailsford’s Tugboat (1991), located under the Transporter bridge, contributes to marking the Teesdale Way (alongside seven other carved posts and signs by Brailsford). As well as providing a practical use - signaling the walker’s route - these painted pieces also provide intrigue on the journey and reference the area’s history.

Documenting and celebrating industry through public art

Heritage in the North East is intrinsically linked with industry, and much of our public art mirrors this. Reflecting rural Northumberland’s aptitude for food production, the Cramlington Spoon (2006) - a massive metal spoon placed between two fields - is situated in "a very logical place for a spoon to be" according to designer Bob Budd. David Hamilton’s Parson’s Polygon (1985) is another, honouring the designer of the ship Turbinia with tiles representing his engineering work, and doubles up as a ventilation shaft for the Metro below.

Sliding further South, we notice that the industrial connections for the North East’s other major rivers - the Wear and the Tees - are also celebrated through public art. In Sunderland, Shadows in Another Light (1998) sits where a shipyard crane once stood, with sixteen plaques, each of which references a myth or event from Sunderland history; this was also commissioned by the Tyne and Wear Development Corporation.

A slag heap on the side of the Tees was identified in 1977 as one of twelve neglected sites offered by local authorities to be transformed to be part of the ‘Art into Landscape’ competition; Teesside artist Genevieve Glatt’s entry, a park full of dinosaurs, won the Middlesbourgh land. Teesaurus Park (1979) sits upon what used to be a hub of the area’s Steel and Iron industry. Glat designed the original Teesaurus, alongside two baby Teesauruses - more dinosaur scupltures followed in the years since. Little information existed about Glatt, until Daniel Cochran researched and wrote an insightful biography of the artist with the help of her family (available on the North East Statues website). The land occupied by Teesaurus Park is currently facing the threat of reuse, with a plan to close half the park and possibly relocate Teesaurus and friends; as North East statues’ Karis Richardson articulately puts it:

“Given that they were intended to be site-specific, and that they represent the only large-scale sculptures by a woman in Middlesbrough, this seems short-sighted at best and cultural vandalism at worst.” (2022)

*Teesaurus on its way from the workshop to the Riverside Park on Valentines Day, 1979. Courtesy of Teesside Archives*

North East’s New Towns and public art

Nationally, the post-war New Town movement incorporated lots of public art in their designs. In the North East, there were three designated New Towns - Newton Aycliffe, Peterlee, and Washington - as well as ‘unofficial’ New Towns, such as the rapid, planned expansion of Cramlington and Killingworth. Anarchist writer Colin Ward commented in his 1993 book New Town, Home Town, “If anyone wanted to see contemporary public sculpture in Britain, it would be necessary to tour, not our historic old towns, but our New Towns”. As we’ve seen, civic art can be a great way to showcase heritage and highlight identity. How does that work when you’re trying to locate art in a new place, largely void of context?

Artist Victor Pasmore acted as Consulting Director of Urban Design for the Peterlee Development Corporation for around twenty years, and in this capacity designed the Apollo Pavilion (1969) as a gift for the town. He named it after the space mission of the same year, viewing Peterlee with the same hope and optimism as the moon landing brought. But upon completion, Pasmore’s present to Peterlee was… not well received. There were local cries for its demolition. Cllr Joan Maslin proclaimed it "a dirty lump of concrete”, and during the 70s and 80s the structure was a hotspot for anti-social behaviour. Despite this, the Pavilion survives, even being restored with a Heritage Lottery Fund grant with support from Durham County Council in 2009; following this, English Heritage gave the Pavilion Grade-II listed status.

Turning our attention to another new town: how can I get through an article on public art without nodding to Killingworth’s Hippos? The Killingworth Hippos (1970s) are four concrete-cast Hippos, using a mould created by Scottish artist Stan Bonnar. Supposedly each estate around Killingworth had an installation, though the details here are hazy. Aycliffe waited a few decades before developing an emblematic public sculpture; In Our Image (2009) is a massive steel head, designed by Joseph Hillier. Six figures of workmen, paused mid-clamber, adorn the piece, known locally as ‘Aycliffe Head’ or just ‘The Head’. Meanwhile, Washington has recently welcomed Joy (2022) in one of their new-build communities. Joy - a steel statue of a schoolgirl holding an umbrella - was inspired by the history of the site overlooking Washington Old School. The piece seems to have been met with ‘joyful’ local reception.

As much as people are fond of the Killingworth Hippos and the Apollo Pavillion today, this appears more of an exception to the rule when it comes to New Town art. These pieces have become imbued with context and heritage (or maybe more accurately, mystique when it comes to the Hippos) as the places around them have evolved. By comparison, contemporary pieces like In Our Image and Joy speak to their site-specific context; this may build connections between local people and the art more instinctively.

How is civic art used as a tool for regeneration?

Public art is often used as a mechanism to aid economic regeneration; Gateshead’s 1990 Garden Festival boasted 70 new pieces of art, very few of which remain in situ on the banks of the Tyne today. Many were relocated, including David MacMillian’s Untitled (1990), an undulating, steel sculpture painted red and now found in Newcastle Business Park. Some were temporary - like Glatt’s oversized crochet teapot. Others pieces joined the site in the years following the festival, like Sally Mathew’s Goats (1992) and Colin Rose’s Rolling Moon (1988) (which was moved down from Glasgow’s Garden Festival) remain in place, albeit overgrown and somewhat hidden in foliage.

The 1990s also brought huge, expensive public sculptures to the region, including David Mach’s Train (1997), on the side of the A66 in Darlington, and Antony Gormley’s iconic Angel of the North (1998), built in Hartlepool and located on the side of the A1 in Gateshead. The pieces cost £760k and £800k respectively. I’m not sure many people flock to Train, but the Angel of the North certainly brings significant attention to the area and has become somewhat of a symbol of Gateshead. The amount of money invested in North East public art reflects the area’s ambition and pride in its heritage and artistic talent.

The turn of the millennium brought a £1.4 million Heatherwick special, alluded to in the opening paragraph, to the North East - Newcastle’s Blue Carpet, situated outside the Laing Art Gallery, will not evade criticism in this article. The not-so-blue Blue Carpet - the initial tiles delivered were green, not even blue, and the eventual blue tiles quickly lost their hue - was meant to host lit spaces for exhibitions and historic information to be displayed, though it doesn’t seem like this ever happened. It’s worth a read of Ella Simms’ An Ode to Newcastle’s Blue Carpet, self-described as “a full profile of Newcastle’s, and possibly the country’s, most tragic piece of modern art” for a full slating. And see Karrie Jacobs’ review of Heatherwick’s book Humanise for a wider ridicule of this artist’s work. In terms of signficance - the reasoning behind the artwork, the connection it has to Newcastle, or the wider North East, or just the point of it - evades me.

This spending on Train, the Angel of the North and even the Blue Carpet pales in comparison to the £2.7 million blown on Middlesbrough’s Temenos (2010) a decade later, announced by Tees Valley Regeneration as part of five Tees Valley Giants, with spending at a proposed total of £15 million. This was the only installation realised from the Tees Valley Giants, projected to become the world’s largest public art project, despite designer Anish Kapoor insisting it would be finished as promised. The Regeneration project lauded the Tees Valley Giants as “massive in impact, scale and world status”, and at the centre of it, recalling the heritage of the Tees Valley. Perhaps this vision was sullied from the start; back in 2008, The Guardian Arts correspondent Mark Brown joked the project “began with a pair of tights and two rings”. Stockton, Darlington, Hartlepool and Redcar and Cleveland have (at the time of writing) failed to receive their giants.

What’s the point of all this public art?

Public art can serve many purposes; it can create a talking point, be a documentation of heritage (industrial, social, political, or otherwise), or even act as a punctuation, to mark the end of something. It is as tricky to document as the heritage it reflects; it can be viewed with the same sweeping variety of perspectives as the history it can champion, and it can be used as a valuable mechanism for spotlighting pride in a community’s past and highlighting hope for a region’s future.

Whilst initial reception of a piece may be critical, attitudes change and objects can become tolerated, appreciated, and even cherished (by some!) - just take Apollo Pavilion as a prime example. Clearly, if a piece resonates with, and more importantly, feels owned by the community it is located in, it is more likely to find success - and last.

Much Civic art is lost, crumbles, may be forgotten and disliked; but equally, lots of it is refound, repaired, remembered and revered as the decades go on.

Maud’s particular creative focus is the intersection between the built environment, culture, design and communication. They recently worked with Newcastle University's Dr Shane McCorristine on a exhibition on the Rise and Decline of Newcastle's Public Toilets, as well as creating a audio walk guide funded by New Writing North exploring the same subject. Maud also wrote a complimenting piece for the North East Heritage Library, entitled "The 'Golden Age' of Newcastle's Netties".