"We're now on the point of commissioning the most famous sculpture in Britain," says Mike White, assistant director of arts, shutting his eyes as he answers one more question.Yet the bigger uncertainty remains: the Angel will probably be built, but to what effect? White talks about pounds 800,000 of business for local concerns which need it - perhaps for Swan Hunter, ship-building symbol of the region's regenerative capabilities, and favourites to win the fabrication contract. Every criticism, from messed-up local television reception down, has been deflected with official surveys, Angel education programmes and slightly exasperated denials. They discuss it in the hotel." When Gormley's plans got their Lottery grant in April, she let Newsnight into her bar and defended him Minds have been changed in the towerblocks too. Eva Mullen lives in the one nearest to the hill, in a flat looking down on it from the fifth floor.

"The more they talk about the Angel, the more I want to see it up," she says, squinting from a hot bench at its imaginary outline.Meanwhile the sculpture has steamed on through its council votes like a heavy-plated dreadnought, under fire but apparently unsinkable. Between March and May, 25,000 people came to see it, the most ever for an exhibition in the North-east - and six times as many as signed Kathy King's petition against the Angel."People are saying there's method in Gormley's madness," says Caron Storey, who manages a pub and guest house across the road from the site for the Angel, and sees the main chance "Loads of people went to see Field. Gateshead is helping to stage Visual Arts UK, an all-year fantasia of exhibitions and events which Northern Arts won for the region. As part of it, Gormley made a rather different visit to the town in the spring, collaborating with local volunteers to set up and exhibit Field, a bewitching army of 40,000 tiny terracotta figures, in an abandoned factory near the centre. This year, however, the Angel has begun to look more possible. In June 1995, the council abandoned plans to erect a cone made of paving slabs in a southern suburb of Gateshead called Eighton Banks.