ANGEL OF THE NORTH
To come to the Angel is to feel the land rise. You don’t so much arrive as ascend towards it. On this particular afternoon, a long heat had settled over the Tyne valley, bleaching the sky to a pale, ceramic blue. The air was thick with the thrum of distant traffic and the scent of hot tarmac and dry grass. And there it stood, on its low, man-made hillock, a creature of rust and air. It did not loom, not in the way a cathedral or a skyscraper does. Instead, it held its ground, its vast wingspan a statement of presence, a quiet assertion against the shimmering horizon.
Up close, the corten steel skin was a landscape in itself, a cartography of weather and time. Its colour was not a simple brown, but a complex palette of ochre, umber, and burnt orange, scored with runnels where rain had traced its own slow paths downwards. To lay a hand on its flank was to feel the day’s heat held deep within the metal, a stored warmth that spoke of its mineral origins, of the pressure and fire that forged the coal seams honeycombing the ground beneath. It is an industrial icon, yes, but it feels older, more elemental; a thing drawn up from the deep earth and given wings.
I tilted my head back, following the lines of the body to where they met the sky. The sheer, empty blue was immense. And then I saw them: high, so high they were almost invisible, two passenger jets crawling westwards on different flight paths. They were silent from this distance, silver needles stitching their way through the upper atmosphere. Behind each, a trail of pure white vapour unfurled, a line of instant, blossoming cloud in the cold emptiness. As I watched, the planes continued their journeys, but their wakes remained, slowly stretched and feathered by the high winds.
For a full minute, a perfect, impossible geometry held. The two vapour trails, widening and diffusing, intersected at just the right point. They formed a second pair of wings, vast and ethereal, that hung in the air directly behind the Angel’s solid steel limbs. One angel of iron, forged and welded, was momentarily graced with another of ice-crystal and air. It was a coincidence of breath-catching beauty, a confluence of the earthbound and the atmospheric, the permanent and the fleeting. The steel wings spoke of industry, of human endeavour, of a fixed point in a place’s memory. The vapour wings spoke of passage, of transient lives moving at immense speed, leaving only a brief, dissolving trace. The moment passed; the vapour wings drifted, thinned, and vanished into the blue, but the memory of them remained, superimposed on the enduring form of the Angel itself.