It was a headline writer's dream.The artist protested convincingly, yet there was a truth buried somewhere in the accusation's wildness. The monumentality of the proposed sculpture did make some residents feel uneasy, oppressed even. which is quite a small community with very high unemployment and all of those things."Gormley's idealism can seem a little vague. During 1994, his plans for improving this "community" met their first rumblings of resistance - letters to the Gateshead Post, questions in council meetings from Kathy King.

In January 1995, these swelled into a Stop the Statue campaign, led by all the opposition councillors. The same month, the Newcastle Chronicle, which had all but joined the campaign itself, organised a phone-in poll about the Angel: 250 readers voted in favour of the sculpture, 1,200 against.The arguments opposing Gormley's plans, at this point only unconvincing sketches printed in unsympathetic newspapers, varied in force from the absurd to the awkward. A Liberal Democrat councillor warned of carnage on the A1, as drivers fell under the Angel's spell: "Almost literally, those who have voted in favour [of it] will have the blood of the victims, and perhaps their very lives, on their hands." A letter to the Newcastle Journal declared the sculpture a blasphemous idol: "The Lord shall stretch forth and the fire of Heaven will be unleashed." Then in February 1995, the Gateshead Post, not to be outdone by its rivals' barrage of anti- Angel stories, produced the most thunderous of all. Its position at the head of the Team Valley, crowning the long sweep of the A1 into the North-east, was just the kind of high-visibility site that, despite Leeds, he still craved.