‘Welcome to the North’: Public Art, Place-Marketing and the Northern Imaginary

Abstract

Public art created in the cause of place-marketing has become a common component of urban regeneration. Focusing on the ‘Welcome to the North’ (WTTN) public art programme, this article examines public art’s contribution to place marketing at a pan-regional level. Funded under the UK government’s £100 million ‘Northern Way’ economic growth programme, between 2007 and 2010, WTTN commissioned six ‘iconic’ artworks across the north of England. Rather than comprising a cohesive visual imaginary, these artworks, and the process of their commissioning, are better understood as outcomes of a temporary alliance between divergent artistic and geopolitical ambitions – a Northern way of doing things perhaps?

Keywords:

• Northern imaginary
• Northern Way
• North of England
• public art
• place

Introduction

A gathering of iron men looking out to sea on Crosby Beach; a slowly rotating hole in a building in central Liverpool; the giant face of a pale girl beside the M62 motorway; a ‘flying saucer’ set on a windswept Lancashire moor; a light and sound show below the rumble of trains in a Leeds railway tunnel; a vast steel net straddling a disused dock in Middlesbrough. These are the six public artworks (Another Place, Turning the Place Over, Dream, Light and Sound Transit, Halo and Temenos) created between 2007 and 2010, and set across four northern English counties, which aimed to offer a new twenty-first century ‘Welcome to the North’ (WTTN). As these opening thumbnail descriptions suggest, this was (and is) a very disparate body of work – the product of six individual artists working for and with different commissioning clients, sites and locales. All these artworks were created under the auspices of the Labour government’s ‘Northern Way’ (NW) programme, a £100 million growth initiative aimed at helping to close the (then £30 billion) economic gap between England’s post-industrial north and the rest of the country. With £4.5 million of NW budget directly allocated to public art activity through the initiative’s place-marketing strand (‘Marketing the North to the World’), WTTN – later referred to publicly as the ‘New Icons of the North’ commissions – was the biggest public art scheme of its day in public sector spending. Responding to its own contemporary politics of economic and cultural north–south divide, WTTN was the latest iteration of the long late-twentieth-century project of post-industrial cultural regeneration and reimagineering – but in this case applied to a pan-regional idea of the ‘north’ rather than to an individual city. This article builds on earlier examinations of northern cultural production by revisiting the six WTTN artworks and the process of their commissioning, to re-evaluate their contribution to the marketing of place and to evolving imaginaries of the (English) ‘north’. Drawing on documentary sources and interviews with art consultants and curators involved in the shaping and delivery of the programme, I consider, first, the entanglement between place, artistic intention and regional policy driving these artworks’ production and then, in my conclusion, how the iconography and aesthetic of these artworks relate to, and variously recast or reject, previous imaginaries of ‘northernness’. Before embarking on this discussion, a brief exploration of the historical construction of the northern imaginary and of public art’s broader relation to ‘place-marketing’ at the turn of the twentieth/twenty-first centuries are first required.

New Northern imaginaries and the marketing of place

Defined from the perspective of England’s more powerful ‘south’ as well as from within, northern England occupies a potent and often problematic position within the national imagination. It is a ‘north’ that holds a strong emotional charge, evoking a ‘greater sense of identity’ and a more ‘intensified’ sense of place than any of the other English regions.¹ As one might expect, given this intensity of feeling, the historical and sociocultural factors that contribute to, influence, and sustain this sense of ‘northernness’ have been substantially debated in academic literature (including most recently, and in a political context, by Tom Hazeldine)² and also in a number of special journal issues (including in Visual Culture in Britain in 2010 and 2014 and in the Journal for Cultural Research in 2016).³ If, as most authors writing on this subject here seem to agree, industrialization created the classic (‘smokestack’)⁴ image of the ‘north’ (with its accompanying characterization of the blunt but canny, hardworking, community-minded and sometimes politically radical northerner),⁵ the region’s subsequent large-scale deindustrialization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries enacted an equally powerful force on the remoulding of this imaginary. Beset by deep economic recession and by the damaging effects of Thatcherism,⁶ by the Millennium the city regions of northern England had come to be most strongly identified with a narrative of widespread economic and social decline:⁷ an imaginary of place dominated by desolate brownfield sites, streets of broken, boarded-up terraced housing and of inner-city interracial rioting. The 1980s to the early 2000s were thus a period of fundamental shift in northern cultural identities, especially in relation to the re-imagineering of the former industrial cities. From the late 1990s on, boosted by New Labour’s enthusiasm for the creative industries and for regionalism, from Liverpool in the north-west to (the newly conjoined) NewcastleGateshead in the north-east, cultural regeneration – the reinvention of the cityscape as a cultural destination – was becoming the key policy driver for northern economic and social recovery. This resulted in a significant shift in the northern imaginary where old images of place were being (forcibly or voluntarily) cast off, often in pursuit of more globalized aspirations and competitive inter-urban concerns. Such efforts were heavily influenced by the pervasive support for ‘creative city’ concepts, and part of a marked post-millennial thrust towards ‘iconic’ public art production – largely brought on by the arrival and subsequent popularization of Gateshead’s Angel of the North (Antony Gormley 1998).⁸ Along with investment in glitzy ‘world class’ arts buildings and high-profile cultural festivals, from the late 1990s and into the 2000s public art established itself as a key element within this local-national-global methodology of northern urban rebranding.

Although not delivered until 2007–10, the WTTN programme was very much part of this rebranding ethos. Initiated and funded under the NW’s ‘Marketing the North to the World’ investment stream, WTTN was an unusually explicit case of public art as place-promotion but here applied to a whole geographic super-region (the ‘North’) rather than to boosting the competitiveness of a single city. Although, as we will see, some of the WTTN artworks did lean towards more inclusive and participatory processes of ‘place-making’ (arguably in the development of Dream for St Helens), the WTTN programme was otherwise more strongly in line with an outward-looking place promotion and place marketing agenda⁹ – directed (under the economic rebalancing ambitions of NW) to attracting new tourism spending and stimulating future (public and private sector) investment in England’s regional north.

While public art’s positive contribution to urban regeneration and place identity had become something of an orthodoxy in public sector and policy quarters, WWTN was also launched at a time of mounting challenge from critical and artistic circles to the economic instrumentalization of public art.¹⁰ Here, the hegemonic concept of ‘public art’ – especially in its ‘old genre’ permanent and object-based forms – was being increasing problematized in the context of more performative notions of ‘public space’ and of ‘place’, with leading writers on this subject such as Malcom Miles, Dave Beech, and Claire Doherty, calling for a fundamental interrogation of public art’s established forms, values and social relations.¹¹ Much of this criticism was directed at public art’s perceived complicity with the processes and ethics of culture-led regeneration and, indeed, at its use as a tool for place-promotion. Reviewing such critiques, John McCarthy (writing in 2006) observed how regenerative claims made for public art had often proved ‘unsupportable’: with projects and artworks commonly viewed as ‘mechanistic and contrived’ and adding only a thin ‘veneer’ of community involvement. Further, and quoting directly from Miles, McCarthy noted that public art could also be regarded as playing a damaging role by de-politicizing regeneration practices and in undercutting the contemporary artist’s role as a ‘critic of the status quo’, employing them only as ‘low-budget problem-solvers’.¹²

‘Welcome to the North’: places, alliances, and iconographies

Launched in 2004, ‘The Northern Way’ (NW) was an £100 million economic development initiative of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office devised at the peak of New Labour’s devolution and decentralization agenda. The latest episode in the long-running project to address England’s north–south (economic) divide, NW was set up in part in reaction to criticism circulating on the southern-centricity of the government’s first ‘Sustainable Communities’ growth programme. Published the previous year, this had pledged over £600 million in development funding for the south-east and Thames Gateway: an announcement that was reportedly felt like ‘a slap in the face for many in the North’.¹³ A strong argument developed that the south-east scheme should be matched by a similar growth strategy for the north: a suggestion that gained enthusiastic backing from John Prescott, deputy prime minister (and long-standing MP for Hull in East Yorkshire).

The Regional Development Agencies (RDAs), set up by the New Labour Government in 1998, were key to NW’s delivery, with the three northern England RDAs – the Northwest Development Agency, One NorthEast, and Yorkshire Forward – joining together to drive the NW programme. As noted in later evaluation of the NW, this strategic alliance between the three sub-regions was, in itself, a considerable achievement.¹⁴ Before NW, there had been no shared vision between the northern RDAs. Following the logic of entrepreneurial inter-urban competition, each RDA had worked only with its own partnerships and local agendas, with resulting negative impacts on the wider north’s ability to attract significant investment from central government. Up until the NW and building on different sub-regional contexts and qualities of ‘northernness’ generated over centuries, cultural regeneration across the north was largely energized by competition – as evidenced, for example, in the acute rivalry between Liverpool and NewcastleGateshead for 2008 European Capital of Culture status.

The NW’s initiating document, the Northern Way Growth Strategy, set out the joint RDA’s long-term priorities for economic regeneration and growth within this new united pan-regional north. Alongside an expected emphasis on increased employment, business and skills development, NW’s final investment priority area (IP10) ‘Marketing the North to the World’ specifically focused on external image-building. It was this investment stream that formed the specific framework for the ‘WTTN’/’New Icons of the North’ public art programme. Reflecting the (then) current enthusiasm for public art’s contribution to place-marketing, WTTN was driven by the expectation that ‘the design and delivery of high quality public art pieces would raise the profile of the North of England, improve perceptions of the North and enhance the quality of a pan-regional place offering’.¹⁵ Inspired by the successful siting of Gormley’s Angel of the North beside the busy A1 in Gateshead, the initial plan was to locate these new artworks at similarly highly visible ‘gateway’ sites across the north, including major airports, railway stations and ‘other locations – visible from motorways and railways on the Northern boundaries’ – where they would be seen by a large number of visitors and generally stimulate widespread public and tourist interest.¹⁶ This urge towards the ‘iconic’ and the desire for high external visibility meant that the involvement of high-profile artists of international standing, at least on a par with Gormley, would also be an important element within WTTN’s delivery.

While the NW set out the broad context and objectives for ‘WTTN’, the curatorial vision and strategy for the public art programme was developed by Wakefield-based agency Public Arts (now known as BEAM). Under the leadership of project consultant Ian Banks and drawing on widespread consultation with the public art community across the north, the WTTN Public Art Strategy proposed a matrix of ‘gateway’ art commissions and associated activity for possible NW investment.¹⁷ Crucially, these were mapped against a five-fold set of criteria requiring that invested projects should be simultaneously: ‘Influential – inspirational, highly visible, and accessible’; ‘Powerful’, in their economic, social and cultural impact; ‘High quality’, in their sense of ‘imagination, innovation, artistic vision, and public engagement’; ‘Deliverable’, in cost and management; and finally, ‘Sustainable’, i.e. with clear investment and legacy potential.¹⁸ Although the original strategy called for additional measures to ensure the long-term sustainability of the programme (including the establishment of an NW ‘Arts Exploratory’ and seed fund to support practice innovation), with the emphasis on deliverability within the timescale of NW, resulting investment was focused primarily on in-progress or proposal-stage projects rather than on the initiation of new public art commissions.¹⁹ It is notable that of the six physical WWTN public artworks that would be executed through the NW, five were listed as top investment priorities in Bank’s original strategy. It is to the processes of delivery of these six artworks, the creative, corporate and sometimes community alliances supporting their production, and to the works’ proposed significance within the northern imaginary of place, that this article now turns.

I begin with what has become the most well-known (and probably most visited) of the WTTN artworks, Another Place – Antony Gormley’s massed sculptural ensemble on Crosby Beach just to the north of Liverpool. This work was installed in summer 2005 as part of the city’s lead-up to Capital of Culture (2008), following close negotiations between Lewis Biggs (then Director of Liverpool Biennial), Gormley and the local South Sefton Development Trust, which had ambitions (and some funds already allocated) to develop public art in its locality. As Gormley himself described it, Crosby Beach is ‘the opposite of pretty … a working beach’ that looks out towards a major shipping lane busy with tankers and container ships.²⁰ As well as providing a vantage point on these global trade routes, Crosby is also a shoreline with an extreme variation in tides. This is a vital factor in the emotional appeal of Gormley’s installation and in the way it performs within the landscape – many of the 100 cast iron figures becoming submerged as the tide rushes in, then slowly revealed again as it recedes. As with many of his other installations, Gormley states that Another Place as very much an ‘open’ work: ‘The sculptures … are not statues of ideal or heroic figures from history, they are simply copies of my own body that I used to indicate a human space in space at large’.²¹ Although now firmly imbedded in the Crosby sands, Another Place was not created especially for this location. It had previously been presented on coastal sites in Germany, Belgium and Norway.²² Following its time at Crosby, the plan was that Another Place would then proceed to a new site in New York City. However, the artwork’s success in attracting visitors (recorded as 600,000 in its first eighteen months) and the boost this had given to the local economy, led to a campaign (led by the Development Trust with the agreement of the artist) to keep Another Place as a permanent feature.²³ Adding to the existing investment (£150,000 according to sources) in the temporary installation (jointly from the RDA, Sefton Borough Council, Mersey Docks and Harbour Company, Mersey Waterfront, and Arts Council England), NW committed the necessary monies (said to be another £2 million)²⁴ to purchasing the installation in perpetuity from the artist.

The skills and experience of the Liverpool Biennial team in creating public realm projects was key to the realization of two further WTTN artworks: Richard Wilson’s Turning the Place Over (also in Liverpool, 2007) and Jaume Plensa’s Dream (for St Helen’s in 2009) (Figure 1). Supported by NW investment²⁵ as a flagship artwork for Liverpool’s eight-hundredth birthday celebrations (2007) and Capital of Culture in 2008, Turning the Place Over (like many of Richard Wilson’s works) was both a unique visual spectacle and a technically precise installation: a slowly oscillating (seven by nine metres) circular void literally cut into the façade of the abandoned Cross Keys House opposite Liverpool’s busy Moorfields railway station. Sited at the heart of Liverpool’s ‘Big Dig’ regeneration zone, Wilson’s temporary installation was intended (from a corporate perspective, if not necessarily in the artist’s own thinking) as a symbol of future things to come for the city: a signal of new-found ‘innovation, risk and daring’ in the use of Liverpool’s historic built environment.²⁶ While this claim has not perhaps been sufficiently tested (formal evaluation of WTTN being done very soon after the completion of the artworks) the ‘leaps of faith’ and trust established between the various partners (artist, city authorities, funders and technical teams) in realizing such an audacious artwork was recognized as an important ‘hidden positive’ of the project.²⁷

Figure 1. Dream, by Jaume Plensa, St Helens, 2009. Photo credit: Steve Samosa Photography. Courtesy of St. Helens Council.

This building of effective trust relationships between artists and corporate stakeholders was a key ingredient in the execution of all the WTTN artworks, but it is perhaps Dream that can lay best public claim to linking both corporate and community-based values. Located, at the former Sutton Manor Colliery site overlooking the busy M62 motorway, Dream was commissioned by St Helen’s Council as part of the ‘Big Art Project’.²⁸ This was a public art initiative parallel to WTTN, launched (in 2005) by UK public broadcaster Channel 4 TV, ACE and the Art Fund, with the aim of encouraging local community participation in the public art commissioning process. Blending neatly with the place-marketing motivations of the NW, the ambition at St Helens (as stated in the original artists’ brief) was to create an artwork that would: ‘symbolise the positive transformation, regeneration [and] future of St Helens’ and become a clear ‘brand identifier’ for the town and the wider city region (St Helens Council, 2007).²⁹ While a substantial sum had already been committed to the scheme by the site’s owner (the Forestry Commission) and through regional grants, it was the timely convergence of WTTN with the Channel 4 initiative that brought the project to fruition. Community participation in the commission came most visibly (and vocally) from a group of ex-miners from the colliery. With the support of project curator Laurie Peake, this group had been closely involved in the original nomination of the St Helens site to Channel 4 and continued to play an active and committed role in the project’s development throughout – including, importantly, in the selection of the artwork’s final design. As the TV series relates, perhaps surprisingly, the group were instrumental in the rejection of Plensa’s early ‘miners’ lamp’ (‘Miners Soul’) proposal in favour of his much less obvious and more universal ‘dreaming girl’ design: ‘Despite her wonderful vantage point and view, the girl’s eyes are closed, looking inward. This is in part my homage to the miners and their dream of light when underground’ Plensa explains.³⁰

Intersection with other live public art initiatives was also a key factor in the production of Halo (John Kennedy, 2007) (Figure 2). Occupying a hilltop position above Rosendale in Lancashire, this flying saucer-like structure was one of four landmark art/architectural structures created under the banner of the ‘Panopticons’ project conceived and led by Mid Pennine Arts (MPA), based in Burnley.³¹ Linking in with the sub-regional agenda to rebrand the landscape surrounding Greater Manchester as the ‘East Lancashire Regional Park’, ‘Panopticons’ already had separate (£5 million) funding from NWDA, Lancashire Economic Partnership and a spectrum of local and charity funders. NW’s contribution primarily paid for the night-time illumination of Halo. Replacing negative with positive images of place was a key motivation for the commission – media images of the Burnley area at that time being largely dominated by pictures of inter-racial rioting and of grim boarded-up housing. By moving into rural spaces and making the most of the area’s dramatic moorland landscapes, and actively engaging with local communities through the accompanying ‘Land’ programme, Halo (along with the other ‘Panopticons’ in the series) aimed to create an image that would communicate a more positive story. With WTTN’s focus otherwise on the creation of large-scale ‘iconic’ artworks by big-name, internationally recognized artists, unusually, of the six WWTN artworks, Halo was the only one to be created by a north of England-based artist and the only one to be generated through an open design competition, rather than by direct invitation.

Figure 2. Halo, by John Kennedy/LandLab, Rossendale, Lancashire, 2007. Photo credit: Nigel Hillier. Courtesy of Mid Pennine Arts.

While an international artist (Hans Peter Kuhn) was chosen for the main commission, involvement of local artists was also an important feature of the WTTN project in Leeds, Light and Sound Transit (2009)³² – a sonic and visual remodelling of the Neville Street Tunnel, a (formerly) oppressive traffic and pedestrian underpass running beneath the Central Station. Commissioned by Yorkshire Forward and Leeds City Council, this project was part of a scheme of environmental improvements in the area surrounding the new Holbeck Urban Village development. Curated by Sue Ball from Leeds-based agency Media and Arts Partnership (in collaboration with architects Bauman Lyons) it followed an earlier sound commission created in the adjacent riverside vaults and ensuing active dialogues generated between artists and city leaders on the character and quality of the city’s urban soundscape.³³ Vitally, NW’s contribution of £646,000 (to what was a £4.6 million improvement scheme) not only provided the costs for Kuhn’s work, but also supported commission opportunities for a number of emerging Leeds-based creatives. These included an accompanying permanent wall piece by a local graphic designer Andy Edwards, which sits on the opposite side of the tunnel to Kuhn’s work, and ‘Klanging Banging’, four additional smaller-scale sound works (by Steve Martin, Stuart Childs and Tom Cookson), which were temporarily located in public spaces around Neville Street and Holbeck Village.

Where Transit remains fairly discreet within its urban setting, Temenos in Middlesbrough’s Middlehaven (2010) makes a strong claim as physically the grandest and the most ambitious artwork in the WTTN series (Figure 3). Designed by the well-known British sculptor Anish Kapoor (with his long-term engineer collaborator, Cecil Balmond), this was the last of the WTTN artworks to be completed and, significantly, was also the programme’s sole north-east contribution. (Without Temenos, and otherwise with a notably north-west emphasis, claims that WTTN was a genuinely pan-regional initiative that offered a wide northern ‘Welcome’ would be hard to justify.) Commissioned by Tees Valley Regeneration (under the leadership of its chief executive, Joe Doherty), Temenos was always intended as a bold project – part of a much bigger and longer-term scheme, the ‘Tees Valley Giants’ (so far not fully realized), which was intended to create large-scale (Kapoor and Balmond-designed) artworks in each of the five Teesside towns. At fifty metres high at its tallest point and over a hundred metres long, Temenos was physically the largest and, costing £2.7 million, the single most expensive of the WTTN commission series.³⁴ For all its size, and weight (156 tonnes of stainless steel went into its construction) Temenos remains, however, a strangely ethereal work – apart from its rigid end hoops, the main body of the sculpture is rendered almost invisible in some lights. As curator Matthew Jarratt describes it, Temenos ‘leaps across the site […] the giant tilted circular ring transforming its structure into a suspended elliptical halo. It is a structure which is alive with tension, disorientating to walk under, seemingly invisible but nevertheless a sublime and huge form against the sky’.³⁵ From a regeneration and artistic perspective Temenos was intended as both an ode to Teesside’s strong engineering traditions – most famously expressed in Middlesbrough’s already ‘iconic’ ‘Transporter Bridge’ (this structure being noted as a key inspiration for Kapoor and Balmond) – and as a new ‘statement of intent’: marking out the derelict Middlehaven harbour site (then in the early stages of redevelopment as a new business, eco-housing and education quarter) as a ‘standard-bearer’ and ‘place of inspiration’ for the economic development of Middlesbrough and the wider Tees Valley.³⁶ Placing Temenos within a longer tradition of international public art commissioning in the north-east (which started with Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Bottle of Notes in 1993), Jarratt observes how Kapoor and Balmond’s work for Middlehaven had ‘reinforced the perception that the North East is a place which supports new design and creativity and encourages artists’ ideas at the centre of major projects’.³⁷

Figure 3. Temenos, by Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, Middlesbrough, 2010. Photo credit: Petegal-half. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Evaluating the impacts of ‘Welcome to the North’

Ten years and more on from the completion of this final artwork in the WTTN series, how might the success of the WTTN public art programme now be evaluated? To what extent did WTTN achieve its ambitions as formulated under the NW agenda? According to evaluation reports commissioned by the RDAs (conducted separately by the Policy Research Institute/Leeds Metropolitan University and by SQW Consulting) during and at the close of the NW initiative, the public art programme evidenced very little measurable economic impact in attracting new inward investment into the north, at least in the short period then available for such assessments. Of the £10 million overall funding associated with the public art commissions (£4.5 million of which was contributed directly by NW), only £730,000 was raised from private sector resources (this sum going wholly to Temenos): the remaining investment being drawn from either the three RDAs themselves or from other public sector partners.³⁸ Despite the best efforts of the curators and arts agencies to actively involve communities in the art commissions – especially with Halo, Dream and Transit – immediate measurable evidence of benefit to local residents remained elusive, although some projects did find favour with commercial property developers in raising the overall ‘desirability’ of the local area.³⁹

Where WTTN proved more immediately impactful was in raising the positivity of the north’s external media profile.⁴⁰ As discussed already, from a corporate place-marketing perspective, the WTTN artworks were very much intended as inspirational flagship pieces – heralding new things to come for northern regeneration and future investment. In the words of their commissioning bodies and public sector backers, alongside the external ‘welcome’ they supposedly offered, these artworks were spoken of, variously, as symbols of innovation and risk-taking, environmental transformation and growing cultural confidence. As might be expected given the very different visual forms these works took, some of the WTTN artworks have proved much more successful in carrying forward this newly revised northern imaginary than others. Reviewing such successes, curator Laurie Peake (who led on three of the WTTN commissions) reports how Another Place, in particular, became the ‘poster boy’ for Liverpool’s Capital of Culture Year, while Plensa’s Dream, which had equal ambitions as a regional icon never really caught on in that way.⁴¹ Some fifteen years on from their completion, images of Another Place and Halo still feature prominently on regional tourism sites (including VisitLiverpool and VisitLancashire) and in positive visitor reviews (e.g. on Trip Advisor). Although it is noticeable that elsewhere Halo generally loses out to the more photogenic (and appealingly titled) ‘Panopticon’ the Singing Ringing Tree.⁴² Along with Gormley’s earlier Angel of the North, Kapoor’s Temenos (in a dramatic evening silhouette shot) now occupies a prime spot on the local BBC North news credits. Being more integrated into the urban fabric and with (difficult to photograph) kinetic elements, Turning the Place Over and Sound and Light Transit have both resisted capture in this type of single impactful image. While Wilson’s piece is no longer active (although apparently still in situ) and Kuhn’s is probably, for many of its passer-by publics, now absorbed into the invisible backdrop of daily experience, arguably both these artworks do retain something of an iconic status – although more through public memory and by reputation within the arts community than through active public relations and press use. While such images of the WTTN artworks may live on, WWTN’s ambitions of longer-term sustainability and legacy potential were, however, largely unrealized. Opportunities to pursue plans and ideas for developing public art’s broader influence on the pan-regional northern regeneration agenda (as outlined in the original WTTN Public Art Strategy document) were ultimately quashed by the significant squeeze on government finances post-2008 and the subsequent winding up of the RDAs (and thus of NW) by the incoming Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government in 2011. In the much more constrained economic climate of the 2010s, public and political confidence in public art’s positive contribution to place-marketing and to cultural regeneration (especially in its large scale ‘iconic’ form – as espoused in WTTN) has never since reached the heights of NW-scale public investment.

Conclusion: a northern ‘way’ of doing things?

Evaluation and measurable successes (or not) aside, what do these six WTTN public artworks, created in the mid-to-late 2000s, contribute to our current and continuing sense of an English ‘north’ or of an evolving northern imaginary?

Penny Fielding writes that, in spatial geography ‘there is no more tantalizing’ or ‘infinitely flexible’ a term than ‘region’.⁴³ While the relative (and familiar) regional labels of ‘North-West’, ‘North-East’ and ‘Yorkshire’, for example, might evoke clearer and stronger attachments of place-identity, the new construction of a broader ‘pan-regional’ vision – as a key objective of the NW – was always going to prove, at best, problematic. As already related, with new political forces at play, NW itself turned out to be only a short-lived construction. As a new geographic imaginary, the WTTN artworks reflect this difficulty, with the six artworks seeming more territorial (Liverpudlian, Lancastrian, north-eastern, etc.) than unifying. Indeed, as the original NW Public Art Strategy document itself argued, the diverse cultures and competitive nature of the northern city-regions is almost as a defining character of the English ‘northern spirit’.⁴⁴ Although structurally linked through the public patronage of NW, as I have indicated, these six ‘New Icons’ are highly disparate artworks, created in separate places and contexts by very different artists. Apart from a common ability to amplify and embrace the physical particularities of their individual locations, the resulting artworks are not linked by any outwardly shared aesthetic or iconography. At the same time, while these sites may be recognizably ‘northern’ places (in post-industrial terms) – an ex-colliery site, a former steel port, for example – beyond their perhaps ‘masculine’ aesthetic (arguably evidenced in artistic preoccupations with scale, industrial materiality and form), other easily recognized visual tropes of (industrial) northern-ness (as demonstrated most clearly in Plensa’s rejected ‘miner’s lamp’ proposal) have been expunged from these projects. Instead, what we see is a definite trend towards a more open or enigmatic imagery. Offered, artistically, as abstract structures or as anonymous or archetypal figures (like Gormley’s Angel before them) these WTTN commissions urge us to look to a vague but aspirational future rather than celebrating or providing a critical commentary on these sites’ more particular and grounded pasts.

What links these artworks better is the career status, and scale of authorship, of the artists involved. Apart from John Kennedy (designer of Halo), the WTTN artists were all established international names – recognized and operating within a global art world and bringing guaranteed experience in public art production.⁴⁵ With project budgets ranging individually from the hundreds of thousands (Halo, Turning the Place Over) to nearly £3 million (Temenos) what the WTTN programme certainly did not do was to use artists as ‘low cost’ service providers. Whilst embedded in the processes and finances of urban regeneration, and linking to a broader northern internationalist urge noted by Gabriel Gee,⁴⁶ I would suggest that this urge to draw in world-leading artists such as Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Jaume Plensa to the NW project was also driven by the north’s desire and efforts to establish its own art world credentials: as a place, independent from the (southern) centre, where serious art by important artists could be commissioned, made and importantly, seen.

In process terms, while the original NW Public Art Strategy did put forward recommendations for more developmental and experimental routes for public art production, WTTN commissioning activity primarily focused on what was do-able within the tight timescale for delivery required by the NW. The decision to invest principally in public art projects that were already in progress, and in some cases already designed (Halo) or even installed (Another Place), rather than commissioning from scratch was a key move. Nonetheless, as WTTN consultant Ian Banks has pointed out, this high level of achievement was only made possible through the volume and energy of public art activity already happening across the north of England at the time.⁴⁷ As evidenced most strongly perhaps in Liverpool and the north-east, this was a spectrum of engagement which was itself facilitated by an ecology of art expertise established over several preceding decades and founded on an approach to contemporary art production that was based primarily in public space (and especially regenerative space) rather than in the private world of the commercial gallery. This is not, of course, to say that substantial public art commissioning activity does not take place in other parts of England – demonstratively it has and does – but rather that in the 2000s (and since The Angel of the North) this was a field of art making that the north seemed, especially, to embrace. Although vulnerable to critiques of ‘art-washing’,⁴⁸ the facility and agility (or entrepreneurialism) with which northern arts agencies and curators had learnt to engage with the language of regeneration and to harness at least a portion of its considerable financial resources for the purposes of making art in this period is, in itself, quite remarkable. Marginalized for decades by the London art market (although energized by some flagship infrastructural art investment from the National Lottery) by the mid-2000s, Northern curators clearly knew where the new big money was and, beyond their own beliefs in the regenerative value of public art, had a pragmatic sense of what they had to say/do to negotiate access to it. Looking to WTTN’s processes of curation and production – to the temporary alliances it built between artists, curators and the economic regeneration sector – rather than representing a coherent northern visual imaginary, what the six ‘New Icons’ of the ‘WTTN’ programme perhaps signify rather better is a NW of doing things?

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are due to Venda Louise Pollock who has been instrumental in helping me think through the ideas discussed in this article, and also to public art curators and consultants Sue Ball, Ian Banks, Matthew Jarratt, Nick Hunt and Laurie Peake for their generosity in sharing with me their knowledge and memories of the ‘WTTN’ commissions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Farley

Rebecca Farley is a Research Associate in the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University. Her research and writing examine the junctures between museology, heritage and contemporary visual arts practice with a particular focus on commissioning and public art production. Before joining the university, Rebecca Farley worked as a public art curator and project manager and as a Commissions Officer at Arts Council England North East.

Notes

1. Rawnsley, ‘Constructing “The North”: space and a sense of place’, 3.

2. Hazeldine, The Northern Question. Also discussed in: Jewell, The North–South Divide; Kirk, Northern Identities; Russell, Looking North.

3. Visual Culture in Britain Vol. 11:3 (2010) and Vol. 15:2 ‘Future North’ (2014); Journal for Cultural Research Vol.20:1 ‘Northerness, Northern Culture and Northern Narratives’ (2016); and the International Journal of Regional and Local History Vol. 12:2 (2017).

4. Hazeldine, 115.

5. See characterizations in: Rawnsley, ‘Constructing “The North”’; Russell, Looking North.

6. See detailed account in Hazeldine.

7. See: Hazeldine; Russell.

8. See accounts in: Gee, Art in the North of England; Usherwood, ‘The media success of Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North’.

9. See definitions of ‘place-marketing’ in: Boisen et al., ‘Reframing place promotion’; Warnaby and Medway, ‘What about the “place” in place marketing?’. For a good description of public art-based ‘place-making’ in action see Pollock and Paddison, ‘On place-making, participation and public art’.

10. See useful discussions of public art advocacy in: Hall and Robertson, ‘Public art and urban regeneration’; Hall, ‘Artful Cities’.

11. See substantial discussions in: Miles, Art, Space and the City, ‘A game of appearance’ and ‘Critical Spaces: Monuments and Changes’; Beech, ‘Inside Out: Dave Beech on the fall of public art’; Doherty ‘Public Art as Situation’; O’Neill & Doherty ‘Locating the Producers’.

12. McCarthy, ‘Regeneration of Cultural Quarters’, 245.

13. Dobson, cited in Gonzalez, The Northern Way, 4.

14. SQW Consulting, The Evaluation of The Northern Way.

15. Usher and Strange, ‘Evaluating Public Art in the North of England.

16. The Northern Way: Growth Strategy, 64.

17. Although in reality at least half of the completed WTTN artworks fit a conventional model of ‘landmark sculpture’, Public Art’s interpretation of the term ‘gateway’ here was much more expansive, intended to also include ‘conceptual and informational gateways, and gateways that lead to sustained activity and investment legacy’ (Public Arts 2006: 31).

18. Public Arts, Welcome to the North, 4.

19. To maximize WTTN’s place-marketing potential, a recommendation was put forward for an accompanying digital commission, ‘Starfield’ – described in the public art strategy document as a ‘new way of imagining and representing the North through a multi-layered and multi-purpose mapping system’ (Public Arts 2006: 3). Originally conceived as an important unifying strand of WTTN, this proposal ultimately took a less ambitious form in the artists’ road trip and website project The Wonderful North (Bryan and Laura Davies 2008).

20. Fitzsimmons, F. (2015) Antony Gormley explains why he chose Crosby Beach

21. Artist quoted on Sefton Council webpage about Another Place (2017) https://www.sefton.gov.uk/around-sefton/another-place-by-antony-gormley.aspx

22. Cuxhaven in Germany (1997); Stavangar in Norway (1998); and on De Panne Beach in Belgium (2003).

23. Figures quoted in Newbery, ‘Antony Gormley: From the Angel to Another Place’.

24. Ibid.

25. NW contribution to Turning the Place Over was £345,000 according to evaluation carried out by the Policy Research Institute 2009: 38

26. Ibid: 75.

27. Ibid.

28. For further discussion of the ‘Big Art Project’ see Farley and Pollock ‘Size Isn’t Everything’.

29. Channel 4 Big Art Project, Sutton Manor, St Helens Artist’s Brief (2007). St Helens. Available at: http://www.dreamsthelens.com/media/2866/s.o.d_-_document_pg_5.pdf.

30. Artist’s statement on official Dream website. http://www.dreamsthelens.com/the-story-of-dream/the-dream-concept/ [Accessed: 12.12.19].

31. See description of Halo in Barnes, ‘Science Fiction in Pennine Lancashire’. The three other artworks commissioned in the ‘Panopticons’ series (2003-08) were: Colourfields (Jo Rippon Architecture/Sophie Smallhorn); The Atom (Peter Meacock/Katarina Novomestska/Architecture Central Workshop); and Singing Ringing Tree (Tonkin Lui).

32. Also known under the alternative title: Light Neville Street.

33. This earlier work was Sound Lines (2005) created by American sonic artist Bill Fontana in the space known locally as the ‘Dark Arches’.

34. Funding for Temenos came principally from NW and regional development agency ONE North East with additional financial input provided by Arts Council England, Northern Rock Foundation, BioRegional Quintain, Middlesbrough Football Club and English Partnerships.

35. Matthew Jarratt writing in Brindley et al., Temenos– Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond.

36. Ritchie, quoted in Brindley et al., Temenos, 6.

37. Jarratt writing in Brindley et al., Temenos. See also Malcolm Miles on Bottle of Notes in Miles ‘Critical Spaces’.

38. Figures quoted in evaluation by Policy Research Institute/Leeds Metropolitan University Evaluation of the Northern Way, 38.

39. Ibid: iii

40. Usher and Strange, ‘Evaluating Public Art in the North of England’.

41. Rebecca Farley interview with Laurie Peake, Dec 21 2020.

42. Rebecca Farley interview with Nick Hunt (Creative Director, MPA), Dec 16 2020.

43. Fielding, ‘Curated Regions of the North’, 159.

44. Public Arts, Welcome to the North.

45. Conspicuously, and in probability reflecting authorship issues seen in permanent public sculpture more broadly – especially in large-scale projects – there are no works by female artists here.

46. Gee, Art in the North of England, p.5.

47. Banks, ‘Welcome to the North’.

48. In other words, accusations of selling out to, or providing an ‘aesthetic mask’ for the public-private interests of urban regeneration (Miles, ‘A game of appearance’, 203).